■■■ 



JMSU J/hSJUL* CLXJUXA/ /UJUOCQ 




>»•'<-< 




Glass I z^y-f 

Book ' 17^? %4 l 






THREE GREAT HACKS OF MEN; 






HUGIN, CHARACTER, HISTORY AND DESTINY 



WITH SPECIAL DITI0N 



Bl -I . B. TURN] 



[ELD: 

BAILHAOB I i: PIO I 

IS' 



Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 
J. B. TURNER, 
n ' leri Office of flue District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. 



' OS" 



r r e fa c 1-: 



[f this little book it will, of course, not suit the 

in church • . for the simple 

reason that no party can, in o nature, embrace universal 

tmtli ; ' any individual can express it. 

The reader will, tit. yard it only as a hearty 

though humble free-will i toward the solution of one <>! the 

of the idm- here id were ; ' to a 

. 

d for publication at that 

time; but the author then thought it not advisable to trouble the 

public with anything in the Bhape of books, on this subj 

The i i renewed, from - and under 

■:. he fell bound not to r< 
lior can make no ] • or learni 

' lia\ b bi ■ n the farm and in other 

jle 1 k on th 

ud never i xpecte to 
I another; and presenl opacity, 

rly preclude! 

olarly an written in a 

ary ass* »ciation ; 
tli few additi ual haste, tl ■ now 

public t cy. 

rary man will doubtless smile at many of 
the idei ontained ; but I trust the 

true philosopher i displeased to meet the frank, and 

unr< don of the plain and simple 

tho id only . epresentative of the 

thou in the land who think the same things 



IV 

without, perhaps, either the disposition or the leisure and capacity 
to give them utterance. From some knowledge of the unlettered 
working-men of the nation, I can assure him that these are the 
thoughts that lie deep in the heart of the great mass of their most 
intelligent men, which do and will form the basis of their practical 
action, whether they ever give them utterance in words or not. 
Their hearty practical contempt for the manifold shams in our age 
and time, both in Church and in State, grows out of innate intuition, 
which the reader will find herein more or less clearly expressed. 
No right, however, is claimed of speaking even in their behalf: 
they can and will speak for themselves — at least at the polls. 

The reasons for the necessity of Hope, to both the white and the 
black races, at the South, the reader will find noted ; without which 
there can be neither hope for the Kepublic nor for the Continent. 

Much herein contained was deemed, when first uttered to private 
audiences, some years ago, prophetic, if not wholly visionary, in 
its character. I leave all those parts to stand just as first written, 
so that my readers will see with what fearful rapidity prophesy has 
already become history. All that relates to the future prospects of 
the black race and of the union of the States, he should consider 
as uttered at that date. 

I trust the book will interest the Eastern man, as showing him a 
type or specimen of the thousands of our unsophisticated men of 
the West ; and the Southern man, as showing him a specimen of a 
genuine ultra Abolitionist, who has voted the extreme anti- 
slavery ticket for twenty .years past, and is ready to no, hake and 
pay as much for the best good, and the highest possible freedom 
of both master and slave, as any other man in the circle of his 
acquaintance ; and, if the slaveholder would condescend to read 
even this little book, he would see how grossly he has been led t<> 
misunderstand all our ends and aims by the false representations 
of a few imbecile and profligate political demagogues. But I am 
not authorized to speak for the Abolitionists, or any other class — 
though I distinctly claim to be one ; for I regard it not as a term of 
reproach, but as a term of honor. I most sincerely wish to abolish 
all tyranny and all wrong toward the white race and the black — 
toward the master and the slave ; and with the hope of contributing 
to this great end alone was this little book written, amid many 
pressing and urgent labors and cares. 



It may strike some that the first chapters, on geographical 
subjects, and on the nature of liberty and government, are irrelevant 
and tedious ; but I think, after a full survey of the whole subject, 
it will be seen that without such considerations no intelligent 
opinion could be formed. At any rate, opinions formed on the 
basis of mere conventionalisms, without a specific regard to the 
ultimate facts, laws and principles which must ever control all 
actual and possible events, must ever be found excessively shallow, 
superficial and unsatisfactory to every rational and thinking mind. 

J. B. TURNER. 
Jacksonville, Illinois, February 1, L861. 



. \ T S 



C ii a r t i. i: i 

PAGE. 

1 

CI1 A PT ER I 1 . 

13 

III. 

I V. 

19 

C I! A PT E R V . 

the Union to the Black 55 

i ii \ i' ; i: r vi. 

I of 
i I rovernment ; 
Policj 
tern of Slaverj . 69 

C II A PT EE \ II. 

■- of the Present Rebellion and : -and Remedies Pro- 

i 91 



Of 



CHAPTEE I. 



If we look at any part of the Creators plan, we everywhere find 
il to be i -.xitv in variety. Man seeks order in a dead uni- 
formity : God in endless variety. Man would dig down the conti- 
and mountains into a dead level of fields, or of railroads, or 
cast them into to build cities and wharves upon. But God 

with His volcanoes and earthquakes, heaves up more in an hour 
than they all can cart away in a thousand years. 

Man would spread the dead level of some petty democracy, or 
•tism, or er all the earth, and over Heaven, too, if he 

could, like a white winding-sheet over a great dead giant. But 
God, with His great moral and political volcanoes and earthquakes, 
will throw more anarchies, and schisms, and endless disorders into 
their ill-timed work, in a single day, than they can all compose in a 
thousand years. And until they begin to seek order and unity on 
His plan, of endless variety, they will never succeed till they be- 
come both wiser and stronger than He is. 

Again. Everywhere in the works of God we find law lading in- 
to law, being into being, i pecies into species, race into race, worlds 
into atoms, and atoms into worlds, so that we can nowhere say, 
"here this begins, and here that ends;" but all things begin and 
end in God: infinite unity and infinite variety; and so far does 
this variety proceed that there can he no two things or beings ex- 
actly alike on the face of the whole earth, if, indeed, in the whole 
Universe of God. in classifying the different races of men, there- 
tore, we may make three or five or five million divisions, as best 
suits our purpose on hand. My present purpose leads me to make 
three classes, two extremes and one middle race ; the black and the 
white races on the extremes, and the colored or yellow or tawny 
race, intermediate. 
—2 



I am well aware that these three races are at present jostled and 
tumbled together, all over the face of the earth, in the most astonish- 
ing seeming confusion, by the force of avarice and passion as well as 
by conquests, wars and revolutions, through a long series of ages. 
But still, I have not the least doubt, that the natural home of all 
varieties of the black man, is near the equator; that of the yellow 
and tawny races, near the tropics ; and that of the white man near- 
est to the poles, in what are commonly called the temperate zones. 
The black and dusky men that are now near the poles, were un- 
doubtedly driven there by their enemies, or transported as slaves, 
while all the white men under the equator, were forced there by 
the inordinate love of gain or power, or by some other unnatural 
casualty or cause. And if peace and righteousness ever cover the 
earth long enough to let natural physical causes work out their own 
inevitable results, we shall find in general, only black or very dark 
men under the equator ; only yellow or dusky men near the tropics ; 
and only white men nearer to the poles. Hence, we may properly 
call the black the equatorial race, the yellow, the tropical, and 
the white, the polar race, in respect to their natural geographical 
location : The Baconed races of Mpngolias and Esquimaux, the 
red races of Indians and our half-breeds, I do not include in the dis- 
tinctly yellow race, although in all probability, they are all — except 
our half-breeds — a degenerate off-shoot from it, but by their pecu- 
liar habits, intermixtures and wanderings, they have become a 
sort of mongrels, like the mulattoes, or men of all climes, like the 
American Indians; of which classes we shall speak more particularly 
hereafter. I, of course, use terms denoting color only in a loose 
and general sense ; and the terms denoting location only in the same 
sense; since the actual causes which make all men in process of 
ages, who come under them, either black, yellow, or white, run 
round the earth in isothermal, and not in equatorial or tropical 
lines. Nor do I now affirm that any particular race now extant, 
will, in the far future, be either here or there, or even continue to 
exist. I only here affirm, that whatever race does ultimately exist, 
especially on the great continents under the equator, must be a 
black race, and have all the essential peculiarities of our present 
black man ; and whatever race exists under the tropics, must be a 
yellow or tawny race, and have all the peculiarities of that race ; 
and whatever race exists to the north of this must be a white or 



s*~0 e / 



ruddy race, and have its peculiarities. This is as much the law of 

nature, the will of God, as is the law of gravity or the rolling of the 

es. I shall hereafter propose my reasons for this belief. 

According to the scriptures, the great stream of white men flow- 
ed from Western Asia, Northward and Westward, from Father 
Japhet, over Eur< ipe and the whole Northwest. The stream of yel- 
low men flowed eastward and Southward, from Shorn, over Asia, and 
the whole Southeast ; while th i of black men flowed South, 

from Ham, over Africa and the whole South. I accept this account 
here only on the ground of its probability; and whether the reader 
or rejects it, will make no difference with the arguments 
or the conclusions to which we shall arrive. Each one may hold 
,--v as re i ' ■ nl * all of these 

races. All I wish him to grant is, that they are here by some 
means, and that berm t be governed by those natural 

□ the world. 

We must, therefore, pause here to look at one or two geographi- 
cal and physical characteristics of the globe we inhabit, which have 
inevitably and inexorably lixed the location, character, history and 
destiny of each of these race-, beyond the power of men or of an- 
gels materially to change it. withoul a recreation of the very gran- 
lundation of tl 

[. In r ■ , heal and cold, the earth may be 

divii ward and Westward into three great zones or belts of 

temperature: 1st. An Equatorial Zone, where frost never comes. 
2d. A Tropical Zone, where frost rarely comes. 3d. APolarZo^ 
where all things arc frozen solid for some months in the year. The 
grapher we will therefore drop, as being of no 
present use to us; and what is commonly called the Polar or Frigid 
Zone we will leave wholly oul of the account, as being a mere inci- 
al appendage, and properly no more a part of the habitable 
globe than the snow-ball on a man's boot-heel is apart of the man; 
and by the Polar Zom — I here mean that part of the habitable 
earth which lies some degrees North of the tropics, and extends 
indefinitely to the North— the zone in which we Jive, and more 
commonly called, in part, the Temperate Zone— as already inti- 
mated; one of these zones naturally breeds black men; the next 
one yellow or tawny men, and the last white men. If we include 
all that lies between the geographical tropics in the Equatorial 



Zone, and divide the remainder equally, eacli of these portions con- 
tain about an equal portion of the earth's habitable surface, and of 
course this division of zones, assigns to each of these three great 
races about an equal extent of territory, as their peculiar patrimo- 
ny. Different degrees of altitude, or of heat and moisture from 
other causes, will produce in very limited locations the same prac- 
tical effects, as removal from the poles, or the equator. But the 
great general law is still unvaried. 

II. Let us look at the earth again longitudinally, and we shall 
still find three great divisions, Eastern, Middle, and Western, (as 
we are accustomed to speak.) 1st. The Eastern, comprising the 
great strip, or glade, or continent of Asia. 2d. The middle strip, 
comprising Europe and Africa. 3d. The Western, North and South 
America. Each of these longitudinal strips, or glades, or conti- 
nents, according to geographers, are of about equal extent, or about 
fifteen million square miles each ; and thus, again, about an equal 
area, as a field for enterprise and empire, is assigned by the Creator 
to each of these races, by the creation of the globe itself. Eor we 
will now notice, first, that on the Asiatic or Eastern continent there 
is no proper theater for the black man. Here, the home of the 
black man — the Equatorial Zone — is chopped off and sunk in the 
Indian Ocean, or cut up into Highland Capes, Promontories and 
Islands. He has here no-proper continental territory ; and nothing 
but a wide continental territory will answer for the breeding ground 
of races while still on the mainland. But while the space for the 
white man in the North of Asia is large, it is so sterile and inhospita- 
ble, as to force him continually to war and plunder rather than to 
tillage and art, and was, therefore, from the earliest ages abandoned 
by him, to the mongrel Mongolian race of wandering shepherds and 
warriors. It is whelmed in great deserts of sand, sunk in marshy 
swamps, or piled in rocky mountain heights, so bleak, inhospita- 
ble, and shut out from the white man's peculiar uses, till achieved 
arts have advanced him far along in his career of destiny— the final 
conquest and enslavement of the powers of nature, as will hereaf- 
ter be seen. The Eussian government, by her new interests in rail- 
roads, and in machinery and mechanism, and especially, by throw- 
ing back, annually, ten thousand white, hardy exiles, into the wilds 
of Siberia, in addition to their natural increase, is already beginning 
this great work, which will ultimately redeem to the white race the 



whole area naturally belonging to them ; and while I cannot but 
admire the wisdom of God in this arrangement of these first great 
hive of the human race, I cannot stop to depict the inevitable and 
untold needless misery, from war, devastation, plunder and slavery, 
that must have resulted to the human race, if either an Equatorial 
or a habitable Polar Zone had been added to this great continent, 

f these i and therefore hostile 

i 

But if v i the next great middle division, or continent of 

i, comprising Europe and Africa, Ave find exactly the 

of all this; for here, the greater part of the natural home 

ellow man is sunk in the Mediterranean S -r in the 

I deserts of Africa : while Europe fun tost magnificent 

theat< r for I and arms of the white man, and Africa an 

equally safe and for the Mack man. But between 

. in the ] v man, we find 

what was an impassable sea, and what still is an impassable desert. 
The pr of the white man went out to their arts, their 

wars, their conquests and their destinies, Northward, into Europe; 
the black man took their way to the South, toward their 
tonhl home ; and centuries rolled away, and they uever met again, 
or knew that each oth< r I on the face of the earth. For 

purposes of wonderful wisdom, as we shall soon see, God said, 

. they wi ince 

said, "LET ran M ;" and they have met. All is wise; God is 

wise; ami God is good. Thi 3 and ends of their meeting, 

. wo v. ill Boon explain. But let us look, for a moment more, at 

this old home of the black men— Central Africa. 

[ts shores and coasts are barricaded and blockaded on all 
with a deluge of mud or ad, or an in: i rampart of 

mountains and rivers all run contra- 
wise, a- it' undecided whore the soa is, or whether, indeed, there 
at to he any. With a climate so warm, and a soil 80 produc- 
tive, that little or nothing is wanted at home, while nothing can he 
carried abroad, there stands "Id Africa, grand, unique, solitary and 
sublime : with the pestilence and the death-damp ever on her brow, 
and blowing her deadly simoons an »s in the face of all 

intruders; almost as unknown still, as in the days of Ham; prof- 
fering the splendor of her jewels, and breathing the frankinci 



of her spices and her myrrh, toward heaven alone, but saying to 
all earth, avaunt ! avaunt ! It is as though God had said to the 
black man, speaking through all nature's voice, " Son, thou shalt 
know no being, no thing, but me alone ;" as though God, amid 
these torrid deserts, and ramparts of rock, of sand, of jungles, and 
of mud, had constructed his secret laboratory of humanity, into 
which, during the mighty process of the mystery of the ages, he 
would permit none but angel eyes to look, till the apocalyptic hour 
of his own right hand should fully come. At any rate, on the 
white man's end, or the Northern European end, of this middle, 
longitudinal division of the earth, all has been open, known, and 
gazed at by the world— accessible, revealed, intellectual, aggres- 
sive, antagonistic, progressive and triumphant; while, on the Afri- 
can, or black man's end, all has been closed, contraband, inaccessi- 
ble, mysterious and inscrutable ; filled with wants, without know- 
ledge or arts ; and conflicts and sufferings, without triumphs ; with 
toil and agony, to weak human eyes, without reward, end or pro" 
gress— but not in God's eyes, as we shall see before we close. 

We come now to the third, or the Western, great longitudinal 
division of the earth, comprising North and South America. And 
here again, precisely as in the Central division, and lying alongside 
of it — "pari jiassu " — North America alongside of Europe, and 
South America alongside of Africa — we find the tropical home of 
the yellow man, mostly sunk in the ocean and the Caribbean Sea; 
while, at the North, the white man has a theater of action and 
enterprise, surpassing even the fables, to say nothing of the reali- 
ties, of the Old World. All its mighty rivers and navigable 
streams pour Southward, toward the black man's natural home. 
Here are climates, soils, lakes, seas, cataracts and water-falls ; iron 
like stone ; gold like pebbles ; all forces and powers ; all capabili- 
ties, resources and productive energies ; all saying, with their ten 
thousand tongues, to the white man, " work, work ; know, know ; 
invent, invent ; progress, progress ; conquer, conquer ; " and he 
does work, and know, and progress, and conquer, and triumph, as 
no other being on earth ever did or could. 

South of this, directly over against the old home of the black 
man, in Africa, lies South America — the Brazils — the great valley 
of the Amazon — with the most luxuriant climate, the richest 
soil, and the mightiest river on the face of the earth — navigable 



for the largest steamers, for tens of thousands of miles, all through 
it, with its great mouth open one hundred and fifty miles wide, on 
! [uator, directly toward Africa — beyond all question, and all 
comparison, the largest, and richest, and most luxuriant and mag- 
nificent river and land beneath the whole circuit of the sun ! This, 

ae of somebody, is it not? or is it only 
for crocodiles, panthers and musketoes? Whose shall this be? 
That it must ultimately become, like all other equatorial lands, the 
home of a black man, of some sort, or lie in perpetual waste, is 
certaii . ' . erses all the laws of nature by a perpetual 

miracle. Will he, then, use the millions ot black men he has 
already produced, through ages ml or will he, as some 

affirm, annihilate all these, and create or produce a new black 
race? That is, do all his pasl work over . - to do it 

cording to our Anglo-Saxon notions of fitness and pro- 
priety. For my own part, I confess thai I am more than half 
inclined to assume, without further proof, that God did not make 
old Africa as he did. tor nothing— that lie has not nurtured one 
hundred millions of men tl h all the Ion-- . 

for nothing — that he did not create by far the most magnificent 
land on the face of tin- earth, tl valley of the Amazon, for 

nothing -ami that thus far lie has done all bis work, both on con- 
tinents and races, most admirably well, and has no need to do it all 
over again, our Anglo-Saxon pride, and theories, and speculations, 
to the contrary notwithstanding. Bui I will not ask others to admit 
it vet, but go on to complete our proof.. 

It is proper here to remark, that if this view is correct, no yellow 
race can ever Long exist on this continent as an independent race. 
God has made no home, no theater here for them. They may exist 
as individuals, but a-- independent and thorouj ranized nation- 

alities they never can ; and whether our present [ndians and Mexi- 
cans are an offshool from the original proper yellow race in Asia, 
or not, they are either destined to a total and inevitable extinction, 
or to be overrun and .-wallowed up by the twogreal races for whom 
the whole continent was evidently made: the democratic whites 
on the North, and the moiiarchial blacks on the South. 

Bui let us lo,,k, tor a moment, a little more particularly to this 
new home of the black man— South America. And the first thing 
we should notice is its great and exceeding richness of soil and 



8 

mines in all possible spontaneous productions ; its immense forests 
of precious woods, fruits, spices and flowers ; its boundless fertile 
prairie fields ; its teeming myriads of animal life. But the chief 
thine I wish here to notice is the fact that in its geological and 
geographical structure it is the direct antipodes of the old African 
continent, though lying in the same climate and guarded by the 
same ever-wakeful sentinels of pestilence and of death against the 
prolonged intrusion ot the white man. As we have seen, in Africa 
all was closed, hidden and mysterious, from the very nature of the 
continent itself; but here, in Brazil, all is thrown more widely 
open by far than in any other country in the world. The mighty 
Amazon is itself navigable for 4,000 miles, almost to the Pacific 
coast on the west. Its thousand tributaries, which coil around and 
through the land, some of them flowing quite round into the 
Carribean Sea, are navigable for tens of thousands of miles more, 
while on their very banks are exhaustless forests of precious wood, 
mines of coal, precious stones, salt, and metals of all sorts, and 
every possible product of the richest of all possible climes and soils. 
This country — so open and accessible — so rich in all natural 
products — is considerably larger than the wlfole territory of the 
United States, and with its great natural canals, all built — its 
present crop of untold value, all fully planted and grown by the 
hand of God himself- — it is intrinsically worth a dozen just such 
countries as ours. Its simple product of gum elastic, to speak of 
no other, bids fair, in the progress of art, to be worth more to the 
commerce of the world than all the natural vegetable products of 
the whole temperate zone put together. I am not unaware, in 
this statement, of the immense undrained pestilential marshes, the 
hordes of crocodiles and other monsters and the untold myriads of 
verminous and offensive forms, of both vegetable and animal lite, 
with which God has effectually fenced the white man out of this 
new western home of his sable sons — as a barrier against an 
invading foe, even more effectual than the great deserts and 
jungles of the old world ; but still, unlike these, offering not the 
slightest obstacle to the fullest and freest commercial and peaceful 

intercourse. Now look this country of South America all over 

its rivers, its natural commerce, its climate, its soil, its products 

and ask, in view of these facts, for whom did God make this 
peculiar, this mighty land, the whole of which seems to say to its 



9 

ftituT .v. er he may be, from all its thousand streams, 

and plal ad mountain heights, and forest homes, -- Son, thou 

hast seen thy days of sorrow and of woe: I have brought thee, at 

-. to a large place — a safe home — a goodly laud ; live, worship 
and enjoy, and let all earth hear and know thy final songs of 
gratitude and of praise :" But we are not ready t<> decide so great 
a question, a- yet : for by this survey of continents and of climates, 
we have only obtaii re, our li apo stou" — a proper 

tform — from which to take a general survey of these races 
then . and to note the peculiarities which these inevitable 

physical causes have wrought in each. 

Ai:d here, as the Asiatic or yellow or tawny man is and ever 
must be, as a ruling or a dominant populative power, confined 
mainly to old Asia, and has no natural home on either this 
the one east of it, we will drop him out of 
our • q, simply observing that he partakes of the excellencies 

and defect- <.f each of the extreme races, and has been, in past 
history, decidedly the tii imen of man on earth, so far as his 

natural capacities and qualities are concerned. 

Under or near to the Northern edge of the isothermal tropical 
line we shall find the immediate or more remote ancestors of the 
Peruvians, the Mexican-, the Moors, the Carthagenians, the Egyp- 
tians, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Romans, the Greeks, the 
Jews, the Arabians, the Persians, the Northern Indians and the 
Chinese. From these race- have sprung the finest specimens o* 
art and taste the finest literature and poetry and eloquence, 
nearly all the enduring religions and tin- strongesl and most 
civilized empires of earth. In literature, policy, faith and art, 
these nations have taken the lead and given the law to the world; 
though not equal to their more Northern neighbors in mechanics, 
science, metaphysics, physical products, power and war, for neces- 
sary reasons, which will he made plain as we proceed. 

I cannot pause here to note the multitude of obvious seeming 
objections which must arise in the mind of the intelligent reader, 
to what has already been said, [t would require me to discuss the 
long centuries of war and invasion from the North and Northwest, 
which forced millions of the pr 'per yellow race of Southern Asia, 
round the Eastern edge of that continent, over the North of China 
and the Empire of Japan, and carried them (especially their fe- 
—3 



males) as slaves, and scattered them by thousands all over the 
North of Asia, and ultimately, by emigration, over Europe, if* 
not over all America, quite away from their original and natural 
tropical homes; thus producing the peculiar mixed or Mongolian 
races of the North, which have not yet had time to fade into the 
true Northern color and type. 

It is at least a fair question, whether the vast number of elephant 
skeletons on the Siberian coast are not both an index and a result 
of these terrible and incessant invasions of India and China from 
the North. The barbarians would naturally take all the elephants 
they could find to bear their captives and their booty to their 
Northern home, where, as the cold season approached, they would 
as naturally perish, and be thrown into their rivers and floated 
down to the Northern seas, till the whole Southern country would, 
at last, be almost swept clean of animals of this description ; at 
any rate, the yellow man is no more a natural and original product 
of the North than is the elephant, so far as we have any reason to 
believe. 

There are many reasons to think that our American Indians 
were originally from this same yellow race, and driven across Bhe- 
rings Strait by the same general cause ; but wandering in all di- 
rections, they became a red race or a race of all climes, till at last 
a part of them fell in with the plains of Mexico and the mountain 
heights of Peru, where they found a climate and soil more like 
their original tropical home, and, therefore, began on a narrow thea- 
ter, and on a small scale, a new development of the peculiar in- 
stinctive manners and habits of their original tropical race. The 
rest remained still wanderers upon the face of the earth, because 
here, the yellow man can find no congenial liome ; and they had 
already shown themselves totally incapable of grappling successfully 
with either the frosts of the Northern continent or the torrid heat 
of the Southern cue. before either the white man came to claim the 
one, or the black man to prepare to claim the other ; and before 
these two great races, all this mongrel, or perhaps yellow^ race is 
destined to melt away like the dew before the rising sun. And 
some imagine that, because this Indian or yellow race is thus in 
this process of extinction, that the black man must, in time, meet 
the same fate, from the same causes. But it so happens that the 
real causes which are in operation in each ease, instead of being the 



11 

same, are diametrically the opposite, as the slightest consideration 
will show. For it is self-evident that there are two modes of su- 
premacy which any given race may maintain on any given soil or 
in any given climate ; the' one a supremacy in power, the other a 
supremacy in numbers. Now, in whatever place any given race 
cannot maintain its supremacy in power, it must exist, of course, 
only a- a subject race, though it may still forever hold its suprema- 
cy in numbers, lint, if it has not the capacity, either to rule or to 
populate and occupy the country, or to hold on to its supremacy, 
cither in power or in numbers, it is self-evident that it must perish 
altogether, am! the quicker it docs so, and thus makes room for a 
more congenial race, the better it will be for the great whole. In 
other woid.-, God grants a perpetual lease to all races who cansuc- 
cessfully populate a land, and a lull title ilvrd only to those who 
can both populate and rule it; all others are mere temporary occu- 
pants to he moved out at pleasure, whenever the stronger claimants 
come. Now, this tawny race in America, under this great law, 
had already shown thai they could neither populate nor rule any 
considerable part of this continent, either North or South, and 
therefore could do no less than give way before the white and 
black races, who have abundantly demonstrated their capacity to 
do both — either Working separately, or together, as now. And 
under this same greal law, by which the yellow man has perished 
out of America, the white man will at last perish out of all Equa- 
torial, and the black man out of all frozen climes ; and Canada isas 
unlit a place tor a negro as Greenland or Guinea is for a Yankee. 
i'.ut mere inferiority, either in civilization or in power, never was 
the cause of the extinction of any race on the face of the earth, and 
probably never will he; on the contrary, manifold, Mich sturdy and 
subject races have come up to the final masterdom of those above 
them. Doubtless, the -excessive power of the white man will anni- 
hilate all other races wherever he can at all keep up his numbers; 
and by the same law, the excessive numbers of the yellow race in 
Asia, and of the black race in Africa and South America, must at 
last overwhelm the power and exterminate the white races from all 
those regions. The black man. at this moment, holds the supre- 
macy, both in power and in numbers, in old Africa and in St. Do r 
mingo, on this continent, in his own way, against ages of combined 
antagonism and hostility, which no other race has ever endured or 



12 

sustained ; whenever the chance is once given him, lie will do it 
all over the Equatorial world, in time to come, as he has done in 
time past; and the absurd notion that millions of men, of any race 
whatever, can anywhere upon the face of the earth, toil day and 
night, year after year, and century after century, for the good of 
others, quietly, peacefully and patiently in the great pursuits of hu- 
man industry and well-being, and bear up under it without war, or 
tumult, or rebellion, merely as a prelude to the utter extinction of 
their race from the earth, with no hope and no history for the fu- 
ture, is an idea that will never be realized till God Almighty abdi- 
cates His throne, and Satan usurps universal empire in his stead. 
All seeming examples of such a horrid atrocity in the moral gov- 
ernment of the world, are only seeming, they never were and never 
can be real. 

Nor perhaps need I say that I am now looking at these races of 
men merely as breeders, or sources of population, and not at all as 
masters or rulers, or sources of political power ; for though the 
white race should wholly conquer both Asia and Africa, and rule 
them for centuries, still their population will be propagated and bred, 
not by Europeans, but by the races now on the ground, however 
subjected and enslaved. Our own negroes, even now, though quite 
out of their natural climate, breed faster than their masters, and 
under an Equatorial sun, they would surpass them four to one, 
however much enslaved. 

"We leave, then, for the present, the white race, as the inevita- 
ble possessors of Europe, the black of Africa, and the yellow of 
Asia ; a result which was fixed, if not designed, by the very forma- 
tion of the granite rock of the great globe, which no human or even 
angelic power could change, without new-creating the solid globe 
itself. Of course, our Anglo-Saxon gasconade will not be likely 
to disturb it; to complete the complement of these areas, the white 
man should take possession of North America, and the black man 
of South America; then, and only then will the full equilibrium of 
the three great races be restored ; and then will the equal sons of 
Noah hold nearly equal parts of the habitable globe. Will this be 
done ? We will inquire further. 



CHAPTER II 



But before entering upon the survey and comparison of these 
two nice-, their innate character, and consequent diverse civiliza- 
tion and institutions, it may be welJ to say a few words about the 
real and essential nature of freedom and slavery— of justice and 
injustice — and of those diverse innate tendencies and develop- 
ments inhuman nature, which inevitably result in their various 
forms of social and civil order. 

The great trouble with the Amercan mind is, that it cannot 
conceive of either justice or liberty, outside of the peculiar demo- 
cratic machinery with which we have chosen to administer the one 
and preserve the other. But this is simply mistaking the mill for 
the flour it grinds, or the pudding for the peculiar bag in which it 
is held and boiled; and with us, the mere mill seems to be becom- 
ing everything, and the grist almost nothing. Whether justice 
or liberty can continue to live on the hare mill-stones of republican 
democracy, without any grisl in the hopper, remains to be seen. 
But neither freedom nor justice can ever be the mere creatures of 
law, for the plain reason that they are, and ever must be, above all 
law. 

Wh \t, then, is Liberi v \ I take it to be, not simply the natural 
righl of mam but equally the natural right of evert sentient 
being, or thing, that God has ever made, namely: a eight to a 
sphere of action and enjoyment, proportioned to the peculiar 
oapaciti] 3 for such action and enjoyment which God has given to 
each creature. The oyster needs a very narrow range; the angel 
a very wide one. The infant child, under the absolute control of 
its parents or guardians, is in fact perfectly free, when allowed to 
play in the front yard of its lather's house ; but Napoleon Bona- 
parte needed all Europe for his play-ground ; and he pined away 



14 

and died at St. Helena, under the conscious restraints of a practical 
slavery, amid external surroun'dings which would have made more 
than half the human race the freest and the happiest men on earth. 
The wolf can be free only in the forest range; but his own twin- 
brother, the house-dog, cannot be free, with the whole world to 
roam in, without his own chosen master, to love, to guard, to watch, 
and to adore; and he would sooner starve, and die at his feet, than 
he would forsake him ; and, if forced to do so, he would seek 
another master, even before he sought -his needful food. Now, 
which of these are the more noble animals of the two, admits of a 
variety of opinions. I presume a general congress or convention 
of wolves would decide the question, with great positiveness and 
vehemence, one way, and that of the dogs the other ; and it would 
be of but very little use for them both to undertake to argue the 
case together, in any general assembly wdiatever. They would 
find great difficulty in understanding each other, and might pro- 
duce a general '"dissolution of the Union," or at least a great split 
in the universal canine church. The lion cannot be made free 
without meat, nor the ox without grass; the whale needs an ocean, 
and the wiggler a mud-puddle; one man must have an empire, 
another a republic, another a shop, another a study, another a corn 
or cane field, another an insane or idiotic asylum, or they cannot 
be truly, appropriately and wisely free. Yet all these alike are 
placed by God under a perfectly absolute and resistless power, 
cither in the absolute and irresistible will of their superiors, or ot 
their fellow-beings combined ; for no monarch can resist the world, 
nor yet his combined subjects ; and he is ever wholly in their irre- 
sponsible power. Thus, while all beings may be, and should be, 
in one sense, free, all are, and must ever be, in another sense, 
perfectly subject and enslaved ; and no laws or forms can change 
these facts. 

The present wdiite man cannot be free, without some chance to 
tinker at Church and State. He must be a sovereign of some 
sort, though a sovereign in rags ; and if he cannot govern empires, 
he will at least plot treasons. But the poor black man, with his 
cot and garden, and a few dollars per month, is rendered perfectly 
free and happy — " content, and careless of to-morrow's fare." 

How easy, how good, and how beautiful a thing it is, then, to 
make a fellow-creature free, in spite of all external forms and laws ; 



and how impossible is it. to do it by these alone!! Reader, have 
you dune all yon could to make all God's creatures around you 
truly free? For to this they have all equal rights; audit', under 
this sublime and beautiful higher law of freedom, which stretches 
over all sentient being, and assigns to each its true place and 
sphere, 

'• Proud man exclaims, ' See all lliiii ;' 

' man for mine,' replies the pampered goo 

Still, it is self-evident, from this view of freedom, that no living 
creature can he made truly free, in the highest and best sense of 
that term, when far removed from that peculiar climate for which 
nature has fitted and prepared it. And it is not in the power of 
man, nor indeed of God himself, without a re-creating of the globe, 
to give the white man a proper sphere oi freedom in Greenland or 
in Guinea, or the black man such a sphere in Canada or the United 
States; and as the black man of Liberia and Hayti wisely adopt 
laws and policies to drive white men out from them toward the 
North, so we should adopt similar laws and policies, to crowd the 
black race South, toward the only latitudes in which it is possible 
in nature that either should be in fact truly free, or find a proper 
sphere of action and enjoyment. The white bear and the elephant 
could, as properly change places on the globe as the white and 
black races. 

It is apparent, also, that no man'- righl to freedom, therefore, 
depends at all, as is often supposed, on the fact that he is a man, 
but on the far broader fact that he is a sentient being, endowed by 
his Creator with a certain given amount, more or less, of capacity 
for actio.v, tor suffering, and for enjoyment, demanding, in its 
own nature, an appropriate sphere of action and existence; and 
umber of his legs, or the shape of his head, or the color of 
his body, or the bare name we give him, whether that of man or 
animal, cannot in the least degree affect his rights. The utmost 
that all this can do is to aff'ecl merely our sympathies and willing- 
ness to accord his rights, and in no degree the rights themselves, 
so long a- ho still retains, in any shape, human or animal, or under 
any name, a given capacity as a sentient being; and the brute in 
human shape that would needlessly, or selfishly and wantonly, rob 
even a horse or a dog of tins God-given right, would do the same 
to men and to angels, and, if he could, to God himself; and he 
deserves the execration, not simply of mankind, but of universal 



16 

being. I will not stop to show here, in what cases, or by what 
means, the higher orders of being are justified in compelling the 
lower to fill their appkopriate spheres, if unwilling, or may 
deprive them of them entirely, from regard to the general higher 
o-ood. It would lead into too wide a field. Suffice it to say, all 
modes of human life, and all forms of social order, imply this 
reserved right; but in no case is this divine right of freedom to be 
wantonly sacrificed, or trodden down, even in the case of an insect, 
without a proportionate sin against universal being, and the uni- 
versal God and Father of all being. And what is justice, but 
simply rendering or according to each sentient being such a sphere 
of action and enjoyment, and securing it to them, by all the means 
in our power ? This actually done, by whatever institutions and 
means, in whatever condition, and under whatever names, and 
forms, and laws, or under no laws, institutions or forms at all, seal 
justice is done. And though it is a duty to strive to raise our 
fellow-creatures, of all sorts, in the scale of being, and thus to 
enlarge their capacities, both of action and enjoyment, and thus fit 
them for still wider and higher spheres of freedom, it is still a duty 
of mercy, and not of justice, in which duty each man may or may 
not engage, as he chooses, (for mercy admits of no compulsion ;) 
and if he omits it altogether, Justice cannot frown, though Mercy 
may weep, over his delinquency. 

We thus see how individuals may wholly keep the law of liberty 
and of justice, while the States and the laws under which they 
live may wholly ignore or violate it, toward the same identical per- 
sons or beings; and vice versa, how the State and Institution may 
conserve the law, while its people and individuals trample it under 
loot. And, after all that has been said, the individual cannot be 
held responsible for the State, nor the State for the individual, for 
it is not possible that the one should wholly control the other. 

"What particular forms of government — whether the so-called 
free or despotic — can best preserve the living reality of freedom 
and of justice to all, depends upon the times and the peculiar 
character and habits of the people themselves ; and I question if 
that God of infinite variety, who will not have two insects, or two 
peas, or two leaves, or even two hairs exactly alike, on the face of 
the whole earth, will ever have a dead uniformity of States and 
Empires over any considerable part of it ; and whether our own 



17 

democratic experiment will not at last prove an attempt to govern 
i by A.BSTRACT principle who have no principle, just as our Sec- 
tarianisms and Catholicisms are an attempt to govern the Church 
where there is and can be no real church to be governed, remains 
to be seen. But under this higher law of all sentient being, all 
men have an inalienable right not to a monarchy, or an aristo- 
cracy, or a democracy — not to this or that mode or form of human 
ernment, civil or domestic, in Church or in State, or in the 
household — but simply a right to this eternal justice, dispensed 
where, or how, or by whomsoever it may be, whether with votes 
or without them — with crown- or miters or without them — under 
forms or laws called slave or free- — or as our own most admirable 
ilaration has it: a right, not to ballot boxes, or to democratic insti- 
tutions, courts or laws — not to any particular means — hut to the 

GREAT END, " LIFE, LIBERTY and the PURSUIT of HAPPINESS " — to 

eternal justice between man and man, by whomsoever or 
howsoever defended and dispensed. Here, then, is the true higher 
law over all races, all monarchies and all democratic majorities — 
the great law that hind- the unity and final bliss of the race, as 
gravity does the motion and harmony of the endlessly varied 
spheres. Unity amid variety ! And these few remarks must suffice 
for the ground of the freedom, unity and final fraternity of all 
race-, while we pass on to contemplate the great diversities of 
character, mode, choice and form- of institution- and governments 
which must -till e\ er exist. 

I;m if we could stop to look at facts, weshould note that Socrates, 
the jbesl and wisest of ad the ancients, lived and perished under a 
democracy; and Jesus, a higher than man, under the hand ot a 
monarchy. Monarchial outlaws war, roll and murder by enacted 
law, in A.sia ; and democratic and republican outlaws in America. 
Barbarian despotism and plunder, it is true, in Africa; but 

it fairly admit- of a question whether our professedly civilized 
Christianities have not robbed and murdered more men, in Asia 
and about S 1, in ten years, than the barbarian Africans 

have ever done in a whole century. Washington wisely founded 
a republic: Alfred, and Peter the Great, and Garibaldi as wisely 
deferred to a monarchy; but neither of these political mills will 
grind out much freedom, unless their people put some little human- 
it v and manhood in the hopper to grind. Our Northern dotfghf aces 
—1 



IS 

and our Southern fire-eaters make decidedly an unlucky grist: the 
one heats the spindle and the other clogs the bur-stones quite too 
much. For in a republic there are two distinct and independent 
ideas : the one of democracy, the other of confederacy or consolida- 
tion. Now, the aboriginal Indians, even, were sufficiently civilized, 
politically, to understand and practice the first about as well as we 
do — indeed, it seems to be the natural state of all Northern tribes ; 
but the other idea of confederacy or consolidation, or union of real 
democracies, into a republic, is a far higher idea, and requires a 
higher order of civilization than either our American Indians or 
fire-eaters have ever reached. This consolidation of the democratic 
tribes and races under the Russian government, and its progress 
toward freedom, is a most curious and interesting phenomena. 
Our women and children are at all times more secure in all their 
natural rights, without office or voting or ruling, than we are with 
it; all of which, and much else, tends to show that while this 
eternal justice may underlie all jjossible forms and states of society, 
whether called free or not, it may even more easily perish out of 
the best of them, and out of all alike. In other words, they are all 
alike — at best, nothing but a variable and uncertain means; and 
not the great eternal end of all action, all being and all law. 

Now, in Liberia, in Africa, even under a republican form like 
our own, and also in llayti, W. I., every white man is denied, just 
as every black man is here, all right of citizenship, as it is called, 
in the State; and yet no white man there complains of this, or has 
any cause to complain, because the black men there give them all 
this substantial justice — a real though not a political freedom — 
and if the whites would do the same by the blacks here, they 
would have just as little reason to complain ; and if they will not 
do it without the force of formal law, they would not probably do 
it with it: for no law can really force the popular will, in any 
country — it can only express it; and a regeneration of wills is the 
only practical course toward a regeneration of the laws. Not 
merely technical and ecclesiastic, based on a change without a 
difference ; but practical and real. For it is not mere intellections 
or abstractions, or the formal machinery of some cant orthodoxy of 
faith or polity — democratic or otherwise — that mainly protects 
any race or any man in his real rights; but only the living senti- 
ment of justice, written, not in the head, (much less on tanned 



19 

sheep-skins.) but in the great, ever-living heart of the people. 
With this, the highest freedom is under all modes and forms possi- 
ble, and without it, it is everywhere equally impossible. And 
in a natural capacity for this ever-living and Divine sentiment of 
the human soul, the black man is, as we shall see, not only the 
equal, but vastly the superior of the Northern races, and will, 
therefore, need far less abstract machinery of government, fewer 
democratic safe-guards and props and crutches, to enable both his 
liberty and his justice to stand and walk the earth alone; while 
with the Northern races this generous sentiment needs all the 
political and legislative poulticing and blistering and bolstering it 
can possibly get, and even then it seems constantly to relapse into 
some new attack of scrofulous selfishness and egotism. Our great- 
est political and social danger seems to lie in the fact that we are 
striving to elevate great multitudes of white men to a sphere of 
action entirely above their capacity, while we at the same time 
strive to crowd the black man down even below his appropriate 
and natural sphere. A white fool may be nol only a voter, but a 
ruler, legislator, senator, governor, judge, or even president of the 
United States; while a black philosopher catfnot be even a free man. 

The ground- work of all human development or civilization seems 
to be this: The whole world in which we live is God's great 
patent machine for grinding over conflicts, antagonisms, suffering, 
sorrow, pain, woe, and evil of all sorts, into concord, peace and 
virtue on earth, and final, everlasting purity and bliss in heaven, 
(bid himself furnishes free \<;\:scy and natural good and evil, 
as the primary and indispensable conditions of the process. I say 
indispensable, for without natural evil, temptation, trial, and conse- 
quent victory ami virtue, would be as impossible as fire without 
heat, attraction without matter, or motion without force. Under 
these conditions so furnished, his creatures, by their own free acts 
of right or wrong, of virtue or of vice, elaborate their conflicts, 
antagonisms and agonisms; and with these, as the raw materials, 
they fill the hopper. I hit God alone tends the mill — and most 
admirably well, to,,, whether we can see it or not. 

It would seem that the materials presented by them are rather 
rough, compared with the product required, and that the processes 
of their elaboration and refinement arc in reality so difficult, that 
it would be quite inexpedient for a mortal being to assume the 



20 

charge and care of the process, though many think themselves 
quite competent at least to tell how it ought to be done. But for- 
tunately, God still keeps his own counsel, and works in his own 
way; and if there is any other way possible, either in this world 
or in any other, of producing intelligent virtue and its conse- 
quent bliss, we mortals can neither possibly know it, nor even 
conceive of it. When we, therefore, ask why evil exists, we might 
as well ask at once why virtue, or why (rod himself exists; for if 
God is, virtue must be: and if virtue must be, natural evil must 
first be, as its indispensable condition. Thus it is that God evolves 
light out of darkness, good out of evil, and order out of confusion, 
ever making 

"All discord, harmony not understood — 
All partial evil, universal good." 

One chief part of this great process is, the law of hereditary 
civilization, a development by which— amid antagonisms, and 
conflicts, and agonisms, and wars of all sorts, between the serfdoms 
and masterdoms of races and orders — the lower order is made grad- 
ually and slowly, but surely to rise in the scale of being, and need 
and demand a broader and higher sphere of freedom and of action 
for itself; and thus the groaning ages, like the harsh gratings at 
every new turn of the kaleidoscope, are made to herald, some new 
vision of beauty and glory, of virtue and of freedom upon the earth. 
This development, both of the individual and of the race, is never 
from within — and the spontaneous act of the subject, but always 
from without, and enforced by a masterdom of superiors of some 
sort. Thus the Jews, although the offspring of a choice man, were 
still ground in this mill of despotism for four hundred years in 
Egypt — our own ancestors some thousand years in Europe, and 
how long before we cannot tell — and now, the negroes of Africa 
and aW other barbarous nations are taking their inevitable turn in 
the mill, and are actually rising in the scale of being, and therefore, 
demanding for themselves a broader sphere of freedom, just as we 
and all others have done before them ; and this simple fact, in despite 
all that is said to the contrary, on both sides, lies at the foundation 
of all our real troubles ; and step by step it must still be tested, 
which of the two shall yield and stop, and which prevail — the eter- 
nal Providence of Almighty God, or the pride and selfishness and 
puny arrogance of man. Somebody must go into the hoppek 
here, that is all there is about it; anew grist is needed, and it 



will be had. There lias nothing happened — in principle — to the 

; ro, that has not happened to us and to aD other civilized races ; 
and if they could have been civilized in any other way, we at least 
inly do n< ; know it. True, the externals and forms of the 
black man's serfdom are somewhat peculiar, and to our minds pe- 
culiarly offensive. But that will only give the needful peculiarity 
to the result di all show. 

Anyone who will reflect howthe various and peculiar hereditary 
developments have been Becnred in our domestic animals, in the 
house-dog, the setter, the blood-hound, the pointer, &c, &c; and 
in the horse, the ox, and all others, will find the key-note to this 
great harmony of growth that spreads over all animal being, but is 
iliarly manifest in man. And the main thing that I wish here 
to be particularly noted is, that no possible amount of training, or 

ture, or disci] aid Becure the result in a single individual 

or generation alone, either in the case of men or of animals, but 
only a p through generations, and the result in one 

individual transmitted by some law of hereditary development un- 
known to us, to his offspring, in him again to be augmented by the 
same discipline and culture, and handed farther down, till at last 
the habit thus acquired and transmitted, becomes almosl i r quite a 
native instinct of the species, inwrought as it were, by the severity 
and continuity of their discipline, into their very hom e s , as an in- 
tegral part of themselves. This is a Ion--, toilsome, and seemingly 
hard way, but it is the only way that either men or animals were 
ever really civilized or domesticated. 

it is said that men are free agents, and should be taught to do 
what is right at once, without all this trouble. So is the wolf per- 
. and if he would but turn watchdog or shepherd dog loi- 
ns at once, i: would be very handy indeed ; but it so happens that 
he will not. 

That this process, like all other processes, has been attended with 
a vast amount of needless, wicked and inexcusable cruelty and tyr- 
anny, on the part of the superior orders, there is no doubt ; and this 
tact has engendered in some minds the absurd idea that the bare 
holding of all arbitrary, absolute and irresponsible power, is in it- 
'. wrong. But if so. the whole Providence of God is wrong; 
ve;i. even God himself, more wrong than ail, for he not only holds 
more Buch power than all others, but he has, in fact, placed every 



22 

son of Adam, as an individual, under the absolute and irresistible 
control of his fellow men as a whole ; for how can one alone resist 
the human race ; they are in fact, at all times his absolute and irre- 
sponsible masters by ordinance of God. And if Christ should 
come again to reign in person, would the fact of his absolute and 
irresistible power be wrong ? and why not % Simply because he 
would use that power to give to every being a sphere of action 
and enjoyment suited to his capacity and his nature — that is reai\ 
freedom ; and the more power any man, or number of men on earth 
have, who will use it for this end, the better for all concerned. It 
is not, therefore, the holding of any amount of power whatever over 
our fellows, that constitutes the wrong, but the abuse of that power 
as held and used. I admit that as human beings are, it is not expe- 
dient to entrust them with any more power in any case, than is re- 
cpiisite to attain the end in view ; but how much that shall be can 
be determined by no fixed rules, as respects either its degree or its 
form, but must be decided solely on the ground of mere expediency 
in view of the almost incomprehensible perplexities of each particu- 
lar case; and right here Divine Providence gets no inconsiderable 
part of the grist of the great mill of the eternities, out of the very 
perplexity, and doubt, and struggle, and conflict, which we mortals 
fall into, over this very point : 

"Great God how infinite art Thou, 

What worthless worms are we ; 
Let the whole race of creatures bow 

And pay their praise to Thee." 

But since every human being is, in fact — by the eternal ordi- 
nance of God himself — born under this perfectly absolute and re- 
sistless power of his fellows, or of the millions of men in some 
shape ; the only question is, how this irresponsible power can be 
best organized and administered to meet its infinite variety of uses 
and duties, to the manifold orders and conditions of beings beneath 
it. Thus, to organize, restrain and direct this resistless power, is 
the end of all forms of law and government. To leave it to fall un- 
broken, undirected, unforeseen, and unrestrained on the head of 
eacli defenceless individual, is anarchy — the most terrible and 
hopeless of all possible human conditions from which humanity has 
ever shrunk with a shudder ; instinctively perceiving that any law 
whatever, for this terrible, moral and social gravity — so to speak — 
is better than no law. We read much learned twaddle in law 



23 

books about a man's giving up the rights of a state of nature, in the 
act of submitting to civil law ; but the plain fact is, a man in a state 
of nature, such as is supposed, that is without law, can have no pos- 
sible rights whatever, no more than he can have a possible safety 
while setting astride of a volcano. Society and law come in to 
invest him with all possible rights, and strip him of nothing but 
bare useless chimeras and abstractions. Proclaim any man an 
utter outlaw on the lace of the earth, and you throw him at once 
into this bliseful state of nature, or of lawless anarchy ; a condition, 
to escape which, most men would swear allegiance to Satan himself, 
if no other protection was proffered. 

This society and law are always morally wrong, when they do 
not adopt the best method possible in each case, and need reforma- 
tion, but not annihilation ; and they are morally right, and should 
be suffered to rest in quiet only when they do adopt such methods, 
however various in different cases they may be. And the terrible 
practical anarchy and outlawry under which — so far as the state 
is concerned — the black man of the South is placed, is an infinitely 
v. >rse feature in his lot, than even the despotism of his master; 
and toward this point sensible men should direct their first if not 
their solo complaint. And it under the present '"reign of terror" 
and ascendancy of the nurtured habit of anarchy and mob law, the 
white planters, and masters, and property holders, and respectable 

and res] sible citizens of all sorts, and their wives and children 

in the south, do not find in this spirit of anarchy, more than they 
bargained for, all history will bo falsified and belied. It is ever 
easy to unchain this tiger, to unloose this fearful force, but it is not 
quite so easy to chain, and restrain it again, at will. This resistless 
power over all born men is, of necessity, organized into forces 
more or less absolute or democratic; and all forms of human gov- 
ernment whatever, are but the exercise of a certain delegated or 
conceded portion of this universal and resistless power of the race, 
in whom alone, lies the only absolute sovereignty on earth, and the 
fountain of all other sovereignty — the gasconade of South Carolina 
demagogues to the contrary notwithstanding. In the family, the 
school, the prison, the retreats for the insane and the unfortunate, 
in the army and navy, and on shipboard, it usually is, within cer- 
tain limits, either of necessity, or mOst naturally, wholly personal 
and absolute in its form of administration, but not therefore un- 



24 

just. But in the Held, the shop, and the state, it admits of a mul- 
titude <>f forms, more or less absolute or democratic, according to 
the nature of the case, and the civilization, wants, tastes and habits 
of the governed. Among the most civilized Northern races, every 
state must, for the present, have a double administration — the 
one for the field and the shop democratic, the other for the army and 
navy despotic ; but neither should be unjust or inhuman. Our own 
peculiarity consists solely in the simple fact, that we have to deal 
with two extreme races, on two extremes of civilization, and re- 
quiring therefore, the same double administration, on the same 
ground, namely : that of the shop and the field — the one demo- 
cratic for the white race, the other absolute for the black race. 
That this fact should necessarily render the administration more 
complex and difficult, and liable to excite opposition and offence, is 
self-evident; but it need not therefore be unjust. Suppose that 
we had one division of the army consisting of old veterans, whose 
ancestors had been disciplined to war from time immemorial, and 
that their hereditary discipline and valor had become so complete, 
war was such a second nature to them, that they could be trusted, 
to plan and conduct every campaign by democratic vote, and best 
inspired to duty and heroism by allowing them so to do. But 
another division, right alongside, of raw recruits, ignorant, ineffi- 
cient and undisciplined, which we were obliged to command, as 
now. by absolute authority and power, without ever consulting or 
advising with them; are not three things self-evident? first, that 
the difficulties of the absolute rule would be greatly increased by 
the existence and contrast of the two forces, on the same field and 
theater of life ; and, second, that the latter would not be a whit 
more unjust than it now is, while existing apart by itself; and, 
third) that the only possible way of harmonizing these diverse ad- 
ministrations, would bo by inspiring the one with the hope of 
sometime attaining the capacity and the freedom of the other. It 
seems to me self-evident that a law, more resistless than the law of 
gravity, necessitates each of these conditions ; and that the man who 
should expect anything else, if not a natural idiot, he is so near to 
it as to be utterly unfit to have anything to do with the government 
of mankind ; and yet is not this exactly our anomalous condition as 
regards our administration of law over the departments of the shop 
and the held ? and over the two extreme races we find there ? 



Right here then, in the simple tact, that we are compelled to ex- 
tend our double administration over this unusual ground, in one 
and the same department, which other nations are not, namely : 
that of the shop and the held, lies oar whole danger and our chief 
duly. And it is vain to say that the United States government has 
nothing to do with it. We might far more truly say that they have 
nothing to do with our two great ranges of mountains, that form the 
double back-bone of our peculiar continent, and that we will ignore 
the existence of one or both of them, because state sovereignties 
cover them, or because old England does not happen to have the 
same nor recognize them in her laws. But she has the same thing, in 
fact, in her colonies, in Asia and elsewhere, and recognizes it too, 
with a vengeance, in her own way, namely: by taxation, even 
beyond the point of actual starvation, ami then, by a blowing away 
of the wretched victims, who dared assert their natural rights, at 
the cannon's mouth. But this was all genuine, Anglo-Saxon mag- 
na cha rta freedom ! ! ! 

But I have thus far, in this generalization, purposely omitted all 
allusion to Christ's Church, because it lies wholly outside both of 
the sphere and the form of all possible modes of earthly power 
whatever, and is, in its essential nature, means, ends and aims, as 
totally unlike all possible human government.-, as its great master 
and founder was unlike all mere human beings, It is, in no proper 
sense, a government, but merely an administration. All govern- 
ments are based on power vested in authority, and appealing as 
a last resort to force, or pains and penalties of some sort. But 
Christ's Church is based on love, divine love, vested in the co- 
equal fraternity of the whole brotherhood, high and low, rich and 
poor, learned and unlearned, and administered by each and all of 
these alike, according to his several ability. The sole end of the 

one is JUSTICE I NFORCED ; that of the Other, MERCY AND LOVE DIS- 

pensed— truly a "kingdom not of this world, 1 ' and having no pos- 
Bible resemblance to any earthly power whatever — a thing not to 
be voted up, nor voted down, nor ruled up, nor ruled down — from 
the \<~v\ elements in its nature, as far above all human control or 
change, a- are the fixed stars themselves. It can have nothing 
whatever to do with superior power or force in any shape; and 
the moment superiority, power, force, or privileged orders, classes, 
or persons, are invoked to its aid, the whole thing apostatizes from 
— 5 



26 

a church into a mere usurping sectarism or beasthood. The true 
church is therefore more than a democracy : it is an equal brother- 
hood ; it is more than freedom whose sole end is justice : it is Buf- 
fering, forgiving love, whose end is mercy. Such, so divine in 
spirit, so unique in end, means and aim, was Christ's Church, as 
evidently instituted by his own most express commands: in its own 
nature admitting of no possibility of change, without an utter and 
entire revolution. And if Paul or Peter changed this order, under 
any pretexts whatever, they did not, most clearly, administer it ; 
they simply revolutionized it. For it would, in fact, be far less of 
a revolution to institute an absolute despotism on the constitution 
of the United States, than to attempt to erect authorities, and pow- 
ers and privileged orders, of any sort, in Christ's original Church ; 
for the one would imply only a change of the form of the same 
p ()wer _the power of man ; but the other implies the utter over- 
throw and annihilation of the very element on which this Church 
was grounded; the one but changes an earthly thing; the other 
annihilates a heavenly one, or transforms it into a tyranny and a 
beasthood. I do not believe that either Peter or Paul did this ; 
but if they did. they deserve the execration of the human race ; 
for no amount of mere good advice, or fine talk, even from an 
angel, could atone for the atrocity of overthrowing or perverting 
such an institution among the children of men. For the most 
perfectly devilish forms of government that the world has ever 
seen have grown out of this simple perversion — all in the sacred 
name of the Church, and of the Prince of Peace and the loving 
Saviour of men ; and it is the highest duty of our common 
humanity to risist and repel, at all hazards, the first initial steps 
toward such a hideous monstrosity. 

Thus we see that the State, the world's kingdom, in all its possi- 
ble forms, is the organized force of human power; the Church, 
Christ's kingdom, is the spontaneous call of divine love. The one 
drives to justice ; the other calls to mercy. The one in its own 
nature is based on coercion of obedience by superior power ; the 
other wholly abjures it. To interchange these elements in any 
degree is as impossible as to work a volcano on the hand without 
force, or 1o inspire one, while in full blast, on the other hand, with 
divine love. The most we can hope from such a Church is that it 
may become powerless — a mere death's head, to frighten only the 



2< 



most-weak and timid. But from a State without force, coercion, 
we could not hope even that. But though so totally unlike in their 
means and methods, they should be harmonious in their end — like 
two good shepherds over the same flock, one of which only calls, 
the other of which only drives; and surely the man who expects 
to call with force, or to drive without it, is simply a natural fool. 
Let us Learn, then, to -render unto Caesar the things which are 
< Isesar's, and unto God the things which are God's."' 

From these considerations, we see the unutterable necessity of 
leaving all nun perfectly free in all their spiritual relations, while 
we hold them properly subject in all their secular and civil duties. 

These general remarks on the nature of freedom and slavery, 
and of government in general, seemed necessary, in order to enable 
the reader to apprehend clearly what we mean by these terms, 
as well as to vindicate the dealings of Providence with these races 
in all ago; for it' freedom and justice really implied all that some 
seem to think they do, there could he no denying the fact that God, 
as the Sovereign Ruler of all, has been the greatest of all political 
sinners; for he has ever placed the vast majority of men where it 
was simply impossible that they should receive either freedom or 
justice, in any Mich arbitrary and democratic sense. But it will 
now he seen that this is not so, and that God has ever given the 
highest possible freedom to all ages alike. Doubtless the reader 
will still find these terms hereafter used in a somewhat loose and 
sliding, though I hope not unintelligible sense. 



CHAPTER III 



With these principles in view, we are now perhaps prepared to 
compare, (or rather to contrast) for a moment, these two extreme 
races of men— the white and the black : the Polar and the Equato- 
rial race; not in the temporary accidents of their transient condi- 
tion during the mere formative periods of their history, but in 
those great essentials of character, impressed by the same hand 
of that G-od who made the Boils, climates, the suns, frosts and 
snows of their native vales and homes — not regarding those traits 
which some have chanced to assume, but only those which univer- 
sal human nature musl assume, whenever and wherever, through 
thousands of years, subjected to those causes which have made 
them what they are, and would, in time, make any other race just 
like them, in all the substantial and enduring elements of color, 
form and character. For example. I consider the peculiar bony 
structure of each race, except that of the skull itself, as probably 
only a mere accident of occupation or mode of life, while the shape 
of the skull and the peculiar color of the skin seem to be an inevi- 
table and enduring impress of natural causes. Of course I shall 
oidy note some of the stronger contrasts or differences of these 
races which most clearly mark God's plan of variety in man, as in 
all else; and I wish two things to be constantly borne in mind, 
namely: that 1 am describing only in the most general terms, 
without regard t<> the many either seeming or real exceptions, and 
looking only at natural tendencies^ without any regard to the 
immense influence which Christianity or formal education has had, 
or is destined to have, over either race. Bearing these things in 
mind, then, let us look at them as climate and nature has made 
each ; and in this survey, we may dismiss from our minds all other 
tribes and races, and look at our own Anglo-Saxon race as the 
extreme and almost finished type of what we have called the Polar 



30 

man, and the pure negro as the proper type of the Southern or 
Equatorial man. The one, as I have said, an almost finished 
specimen ; the other but just begun, as it were, and still almost 
wholly in the rough — a diamond yet in the charcoal — or still in 
crucible of the great architect; the final beauty and splendor of the 
which has scarcely yet began to crystallize into form. And in 
overlooking this great fact lies the great mistake of Guyot's most 
able work on Earth and Man — which, but once admitted, restores 
at once the needful harmony in all the Creator's works, and leaves 
no ground for that mournful and incredible lamentation which he 
utters over their discord, disruption and incongruity, as he com- 
pares the floral, mineral and animal with the human products of 
the equator and the poles. He, in common with many others, has 
not duly considered that minerals, vegetables and animals are 
finished products ; with them the work is done, and their highest 
o-lory is of course near the equator, under the pathway of the sun. 
But man is still the only unfinished product of the earth : and 
when he, too, is finished, his glory will lie around the same path- 
way of glory — beneath the full effulgence of the sun; and thus 
the entire harmony of nature will be restored or completed. 

It is, indeed, a theory with some that the earth itself was at first 
a mere molten mass, and began to cool down, and to produce, of 
course, its minerals, vegetables and animals, in the Northern lati- 
tudes first, advancing alike both in the variety and perfection of its 
products, as the cooling process advanced toward the equator. If 
this be so, the harmony is still more complete, for then human 
nature, civilization and true manhood are only passing now through 
the same stages and latitudes of perfection and growth, and by 
precisely analagous laws, as all mineral ami vegetable and animal 
nature has done before it ; itself, like them, in turn to find its final 
climax of glory under the equator. And if such unexpected and 
surprising analogies and coincidences prove nothing, they certainly 
do not disprove our position ; for God is the God of unity of law, 
as well as of variety of result. 

But pardoning this digression, the reader will remark, that in 
general terms, the one of these races is inevitably black or dark, 
the other ruddy or white. The head of the one is developed boldly 
and widely forward, in the region of the intellect ; that of the other 
piles and slopes backward, in the region of the sentiments and pro- 



31 

pensities ; and as the white man cannot laugh, so the black man 
cannot frown; the white man "tee-shees, " and " giggles, " and 
smirks, and smiles; giving a Laugh of the head indeed ; hut the 
genuine outbursting, uproarious laugh of the heart, he cannot well 
give. The black man may look cross, it is true, but that dark and 
awful frown of the white man, that strikes through the soul like a 
bolt from a thunderstorm, he cannot command ; and if he should 
ever try, the white man might well, for once, if never before, hurst 
out into a real hearty laugh. The one is thin faced, thin lipped 
lean, spare and active ; the other is thick faced, thick lipped, natur- 
ally inclined to be corpulent, heavy, slow and inactive. The whole 
man, in form, feature, gait and motion, in the one case, bespeaks 
intellectual and physical energy, pride and power. In the other 
it bespeaks the love of luxurious indolence, ease, quiet, grace and 
repose. Intellect and action se< m to he the controlling element and 
the final end of the one; sentiment, loyalty and repose of the other. 
Kven the very vices of the one, are the antipodes of those of the other, 
springing as they do from these opposite qualities in their nature. 
For while both alike love money, power and ease — the one loves 
monev for the sake of power — while the other loves both power and 
n i one v for the sake of ease ; both alike will sometimes get drunk ; 
but tiie one when drunk, swears, and curses, and fights, and kills 
from thi madness of the brain; the other bows, and 

Bmiles, and sleeps, from a sweet delirium of the hear). But before 
pursuing this contrast further, ii may be proper to advert more par- 
ticularly to the real causes of this great and almost surprising dis- 
similarity, not only in bo ly, bill in soul, in real character. 

Man is a being of thought, of feeling, and of action. In other 
words, lie has capacities of INTELLECTION, of EMOTION, and of WILL. 
In popular language, the head is considered the seat and symbol 
ofthe intellectual powers ; and the heart of the emotive powers ; 
comprising the moral, social and affectional powers. In different 
races ami individuals, the different degrees of development and 
consequent diverse combinations of these several classes of powers, 
make whatis called difference of mark or character. In intellectual 
race- and individuals, the former preponderate, and all action and 
effort seema to spring from the head or the intellect, and to be 
guided and controlled thereby. In the impulsive and emotive 
races, on the contrary, the emotive faculties seem to preponderate, 



32 

and the heart seems to give origin, and form, and guidance to all 
action and all effort. I remark on the difference of these races 
then, first, that everything in the higher latitudes of the earth tends 
towards the preponderance of intellect, self-reliance and energy, in 
the mind of man, while all under the Equator tends, with equal 
force, to develop the sentiments and the emotive powers, and to 
invite to social ease and repose. In other words, the sunny South 
is God's great school for the heart ; the frozen North for the head ; 
the constant tendency is to make the Northern man all head, the 
Southern man all heart ; and all their institutions and creations 
without them, must conform to that which the hand of God has 
thus implanted within them. If it be asked here which of these 
will be superior, I answer neither ; for those uses for which God 
made each, both alike will be superior, and for all other uses equally 
inferior. Just as the different sexes of our own race are either su- 
perior or inferior, according to the work you give them to do. If 
you wish hands to solve problems, maul rails, sail ships, or fight 
battles, doubtless, the men are superior; but if you desire hands to 
rear and educate embryo angels, to diffuse everlasting peace over 
all the earth, and bear all things upward toward heaven, even the 
sourest and most churlish of us all would be compelled to hesitate, 
at least, before we should decide in oar own favor. But we Anglo 
Saxons have to make a special effort to conceive that either God 
or man has any need of hearts, or anything but bare brains on the 
earth, and wonder why we were ever incumbered with even any 
approximation to such a superfluity. According to our estimate of 
things, this subordination of the head to the heart does therefore 
make the black race inferior, just as it makes our own wives and 
daughters inferior to our own most magniiicent selves. But in any 
true estimate this is not so; and even the scriptures assume the ex- 
actly opposite position, and everywhere place the heart wholly and 
supremely above all possible attainments and aspirations of the 
mere head. How all this has happened to us, and the reverse to 
the black man, is quite plain. For God's great mission work to 
the Northern man is, to analyze and conquer ; to the Southern 
man to perceive, to enjoy and to adore ; the great final end of th 
one is consecration ; that of the other, devotion. Intellect an 
mechanism are the instrumentalities of the one, sentiment and de 
votion at once the end and the means of the other; the one works 



with the head and for the head; the other, with the heart and for the 
heart. God's revealed providential word to the Northern man is, 
rQUEK or die." Hence, he must conquer the forest, the quarry, 
the mountain and the slough ; the river, the ocean, the wind and 
the storm ; he must conquer heat and conquer cold; conquer dark- 
ness and conquer light ; conquer steam and conquer thunder ; con- 
quer height and conquer depth ; and conquer even space and time 
themselves. lie must everywhere conquer in the abstract, and 
conquer in the concrete, or die ; and last and hardest of all, he must 
conquer himself. Nor can he ever stop in this magnificent career 
of conquests; for the moment lie pauses, adverse influences or hos- 
tile races will he sure to set in to devour and destroy him. It is 
ever on, on, on] conquer, conquer, conquer ; triumph, triumph — 
one everlasting ovation from knowledge to knowledge, from skill 
to skill, from height to height, and from power to power, till Heaven 
itsell is climbed. This is the work, the destiny and the glory of 
the intellectual man of the North. Butone equal to it can be con. 
ceived, and that belongs to the Equatorial man of the South. "With 
such a mission on hand, ever firing his very bones, is it any wonder 
thai the millions of the North have so often, just by way of pastime, 
stepped down and done a few extra jobs at their trade — not in the 
programme — and a little too tar South. All mighty floods some- 
times overleap their proper harriers. So with this terrific instinct 
of the North, that ever hangsabout the poles and mountain heights 
of our earth, like some vast avalanche or deluge, still suspended, 

hut uever stayed. 

In all this career of conquests, intellect is the sole moving force, 
and mechanism the grappling power. Hence, the Northern man 
first analyzes all things, next reduces them to an abstraction, and 
[astly, converts them into a machine. He must see, and feel, and 
love, and hate everything in the abstract, and use everything as a 
machine; tor he abhors, equally, the unmanageable and the con- 
crete; hence, he will weep over an abstract beggar in a romance, 
and, perhaps, turn a concrete one from his doors. His sciences 
must take nature all to pieces, and show her abstract bones, and 
muscle-, and Binews, all boxed up mechanically by themselves, be- 
fore he will condescend to look at her at all. His governments, 
law.- and institutions, must first be all reduced to abstractions, and 
done up in democratic wheels, and cogs, and pulleys, so nicely ad- 
—6 



u 

justed, that he can crawl through and re-adjust every one of them 
to his liking, while they are sure to catch, if not to crush everybody 
else. Under his "magna charta," your rights are doubtless all se- 
cure, if he does not choose to molest them. Under his "habeas 
corpus," you can always have your own body, when you can get it: 
Provided, always, that you don't press your rights to it, too far, and 
leave some one else to find it hanging on a tree. His "trial by 
jury," no doubt, works most admirably well, when twelve villains, 
packed by the sheriff, conspire with the scoundrel on the bench to 
screen fellow villains, or to rob and plunder you for doing simply 
your duty to God and to man. You might as well think to catch 
a gopher in a noose made of his own tail, as to think to catch these 
Northern Anglo-Saxons in their own abstractions. They set all 
those traps of course for other people, not for themselves ; and they 
will be sure to spring them when, and only when, other people's 
feet are in them, and their own out. When this Northern man 
says that the king can do no wrong, he only means that he will cut 
his head off when he does not work to suit him. If he declares the 
inalienable rights of man, he only means his own right to catch and 
enslave negroes. His Bible is a most superb book, no doubt— the 
only rule of faith and practice. But you had better not apply it 
to him, or his party, or creed, or church, or sect ; if you do, he will 
rain down on you a flood of commentaries and dictionaries, that 
will cover you, Bible and all, .more than fifteen cubits deep ; and it 
will be in vain for you to send out either crows or doves in search 
for its loftiest truths, after such a deluge of dogmas. Catch a wea- 
sel asleep, and then you may catch these Northern races in their 
own abstractions. They will have no religion, even, that they can- 
not distill into dogmas, cooper up into sects, or run through a cot- 
ton mill, or ride upon a railroad. No God— unless they can lirst 
make him— "without body or parts," as their old creeds had it, 
"or passion, or emotion ;" and even tins bare abstraction of a deity 
is not entirely satisfactory, until the last possible shred of conscious- 
ness or of personality has been whittled away with the transcenden- 
tal jack-knife, and some unknown and inconceivable essence dis- 
tilled out of the whittlings, which works everywhere, does every- 
thing, but exist nowhere, and is nothing; then at last he gets a di- 
vinity that exactly suits him, as entirely out of his way as his own 
creed, and Bible and democratic constitutions and laws; a first rate 



35 

foundation for the better security of states, churches, and railroad 
stocks, and mortgages ; and if he knew at what court to apply, he 
Mould doubtless patrfut it on speculation. 

We hear much of a skeptical age, an infidel age, and all that; 
but in truth there never was any such age, and there never will be 
one. The eight hundred millions of earth are more believing at 
this moment than they ever were before, and will grow more and 
more so, simply because God lives, and still reigns over all. But 
there is a skeptical Northern Anglo-Saxon race, whose peculiar 
work, which he has given them, ever tempts and drives them in 
tlii- direction, for which weakness he doubtless makes all due 
allowance, and certainly exercises all due patience and mercy. 
This race, it is true, cannot believe that they have got a stomach, 
much less a soul, till they have first whittled it to pieces with their 
jack-knives, macerated it in their crucibles, and demonstrated it, as 
they cull it; and oven if it should come out proved, they can still 
doubt whether either matter or spirit exists in any form, save 
always in the abstract. But other races are not so. And I allude 
o. this only to show how this all-devouring, all-couquering Xorth- 
ern race firsl analyzes and sublimates everything — every agent — 
even God himself- into a mere abstraction, and then transforms it 
into a mere machine <<\' use, or of power. They will generally 
obey a just abstract law. of their own making; but they would 
probably shoot or hang an equally just concrete man, who should 
try to enforce the same obedience: tor they must be governed by 
the peculiar abstract machinery which their own brains have con- 
cocted, and their own hands have made, or they cannot be governed 
at all -at leasl not without constant uproar, anarchy, rebellion and 
alarm, in a word, they are, from the very necessities of their 
climate and their position, metaphysicians, critics, philosophers, 
abstractionists, machinists, egotists and democrats to the back- 
bone — who conquer everything, and patiently submit to nothing, 
not even to God himself; a race whose sciences are all quadrations 
and triangles— whose logic and rhetorics are all syllogisms — whose 
philosophy is all abstractions— whose productions are all machines — 
whose societies are all "anties" whose creed is all dogmas, 
bristling all over, like a porcupine's back, with sharp, defiant proof- 
texts and demonstrations — and whose missiles are all bombshells, 
that everywhere kill as they fly, and kill still worse when they 



36 

stop. Why such a race should have been shut out of Asia, and 
out of Africa, through the earlier ages, till Christianity had gained 
power upon the earth, and most of all over this peculiar race, I 
trust is perfectly apparent, if God intended ever to keep alive 
more than one race upon the face of the earth. This all-em- 
bracing and all-conquering intelligence is the true glory of the 
North, and the excesses and abuses of it to which I have adverted 
are only its transient and incidental evils, during its earlier and 
formative periods. But when this Northern race have explored 
nature, adjusted their sciences, faiths, empires, machines and arts, 
so that they begin to feel somewhat at rest in their new home- 
when, pausing from conquests, they once begin in earnest their 
final work of consecrating their vast and untold energies, powers 
and resources to the good of man and the glory of God, what 
tongue can tell of the good and the glory that shall then, from their 
hands, roll round the earth ? I say consecrate ; for their religion 
will always be a religion of consecration, and not of devotion, like 
the Equatorial man. They will consecrate all things without, but 
never devote themselves to God. For God made them to conquer 
and to use, not to worship and adore , for his glory — or rather this 
consecration of their resources — is their natural and proper worship. 
Some complain of this. But we might as well complain because 
the strong and sturdy oak, that throws out its giant arms, and bares 
its breast, and scatters far and wide its shining leaves, will not, like 
the pliant willow, bow its head to the storm. The one honors God 
with its massive strength, the other with its yielding beauty and 
its pliant grace. We may harangue this intellectual, mechanical 
North till dooms-day, but they will still go on to fulfill their God- 
given mission — to conquer and consecrate much, to pray and praise 
only sparingly. Exotic habits may for a time seem to thrive, but 
they will soon die out; for God will have his own work done in 
his own way at last, after all our theorizing, and dogmatizing, and 
haranguing. 

I am not unaware of the many seeming and even real exceptions 
to these general remarks ; and still, as general remarks, and for the 
purpose for which they are here intended, I deem them none the 
less true. For example, Russia is despotic in the extreme North ; 
but Russia is a new-born empire, of strongly Asiatic origin and 
habit, and has, it is true, like all other democracies, begun under a 



37 

despotism; but I have never read of any other nation that, in the 
same length of time, lias made so rapid strides toward democratic 
freedom as Russia has done in the last few centuries, in spite of its 
vast numbers, its Asiatic origin and habit, and the extremely bar- 
barous condition from which it but so recently emerged. Iain 
fully satisfied that most of our people have no idea of the rapid 
progress of events in Russia; and I think the laws of climate will 
work themselves out there, probably more speedily than they ever 
have done in any country on the globe, after all. Since the writer 
predicted — almost without hope, it is true — four years ago, in these 
Lectures, as then delivered, that Russia must in the end become free 
by the laws of nature more serfs have been practically freed in 
that country than there are people in the United States. 

We turn now to the natural characteristics of the black or Equa- 
torial man. and wo shall find them exactly the reverse of those of 
the white or Polar man. He is as fully his antipodes in character 
aa he is in geographical location. They could no more permanently 
and properly dwell together, than the two zones which bred them 
could lie in the same latitude. It is indeed possible, in nature or 
in theory, that the black man might stay in the North long enough 
to he transformed into a genuine Polar man; but that would take 
probably thousands of years, and it is not possible, therefore, in 
history and ii fact ; or. if so. he would then of course cease to be 
an Equatorial man. and the richest portion of the globe would be 
created for nothing, and remain forever a pestilential waste. 

As God has made him, he cannot he a bare intelligence — a mere 
thing of the head -but a creature of sentiment, a being of the 
heart ; not evolving abstractions, democracies and mechanisms, but 
sympathies, affections, loyalties and devotions. Indeed, if, accord- 
ing to the popular notion, sentiment and devotion come out of the 
heart alone, independently of the head, it would be of but little 
consequence whether he had any head at all or not. except for the 
mere purposes of his physical economy; for he would have no 
further U8e for it. except as a mere appendage to his great magnifi- 
cent equatorial heart. 

A being born not to scheme and to conquer, but to perceive, to 
enjoy, to bless, to love and to adore— the last human product of 
the agonizing age- -born, baptized and nurtured in blood and in 
tears, the only soil oi' earth in which great hearts can be made to 



38 

grow — raised from the horrible depths, and placed at last on the 
equatorial heights of the globe, to give new fire and new fervor to 
its poetry, its eloquence and its faith — to fill with concrete form 
and inspiring life and soul, with gorgeous equatorial beauty and 
grace, the dry and abstract mechanisms of the North — to put living 
flesh on the dry bones of their philosophies and their faiths, and to 
shout with their huge mouths, and still linger hearts, their final 
song of praise: "Hallelujah! hallelujah! for the Lord God om- 
nipotent reigneth : let all the earth rejoice therein and be glad ; 
for great and marvelous are his ways, and his wisdom past finding 
out." 

Summarily, then : as the great mission of the Polar man is to 
analyze and to conquer, that of the Equinoctial man to enjoy and 
to adore; as the final end of the one is consecration, that of the 
other devotion; as one is a being of intellect, of the head— the 
other of sentiment, of the heart; as the one loves the abstract, and 
avoids all that is not reducible to the abstract, while the other 
hates all that is not in the concrete — so, of course, their forms of 
faith and of civil order must differ. The Northern man analyzes, 
and splits, and burns, and stews all nature and all art to find truth 
and God. He of course finds abstractions, but he does not find 
God, for God is not among the abstractions ; but the Equatorial 
man at once finds God wherever he himself is. God whispers to 
him through the stars and through the breezes: He talks to him at 
noonday in the desert, and at midnight in his dreams: He finds 
him at home and abroad ; everywhere, God is with his great 
undoubting heart. He everywhere talks with him, counsels him, 
comforts him and blesses him. He must, of course, everywhere 
worship and praise him, according to the best light he has, be that 
little or much ; for he is, by nature, a being of devotion, and not 
of mechanism. Said Dr. Livingston to the Royal Geographical 
Society of London, on his return from Africa, "I defy any one to 
convey to a native African an idea of a machine." Says the 
excellent African missionary, Mr. Olendorp, who visited many 
tribes: "Among all the black nations with whom I have become 
acquainted — even among the utterly rude and ignorant — there is 
none that do not believe in God, and have not learned to give Him 
a name, and to regard Him alone as the Maker, and Preserver, 
and Benefactor, and Judge of the world. It is true they also 



39 

believe in many inferior gods or mediators between themselves 
and the Supreme Divinity, and hence are called ' Idolators.' Be- 
side their more formal and public seasons of worship — their sacri- 
fices and oblations of oxen, cows, sheep, goats, fowls, palm-oil, 
brandy, yams, etc. — all these negroes," says he, "pray to this 
Supreme Divinity at different times and in different places; especi- 
ally at the rising and the setting of the sun, on eating and drinking, 
wIkii they go to war and in the midst of the conflict, and whenever 
they are in want of either food, success, health or rain. They pray 
for themselves, they pray for their friends, they pray for the living, 
they pray for the dead." They are, in short, naturally a people of 
devotion, of faith and of prayer, and it only remains for Christianity 
to teach them to pray for their enemies, and they would become 
the mosl devout people on the face of the earth. 

The EqoiiQQcfia] man (barbarian aswecall him) even now. when 
lie goes to war, naturally offers a new prayer — the Northern man 
as naturally makes a new bomb-shell ; and this is the exact differ 
enee between the two. The one has faith in gunpowder, the other 
in God : the first may be most efficient in the war of races, but the 
last will eonquer in the war of the eternities; for (bid will still live 
when all the gunpowder has exploded; and Jesus has said, "My 
kingd' 'in is not of this world." ( Jonsistently with this view we are 
informed, in Good's Book "I" Nature, that the original Heaven of 
these "North-men was the gory battle field, with meat to eat and 
wine to drink from reeking warriors' skulls." That of the negro 
was and still is, his own sweet, peaceful and balmy South, where 
ceaseless spring and verdure abide. 

Thi' genius of the black race for poetry and eloquence, and in all 
matters of mere taste and art, has been most surprisingly mani- 
fested, under the greatest possible obstacles, by many instances, 
well known to all, of rare merit, on our own continent. The 
history of the whole world does not furnish an equal number of 
white men who have risen to an equal eminence in these arts, 
under equal embarrassments. 

Their surprising ami almost universal taste and genius for music, 
and their tendency to religious devotion and worship, is equally 
manifested, under similar discouragements, whenever they are 
allowed to assemble in their congregations and camp-meetings and 
lift up their multitudinous and united voices in songs of praise and 



4:0 



prayer to God. John B. Grough, the celebrated temperance orator, 
states that he has heard the finest musical performances on this 
continent and in Europe. At one time, twenty-three hundred 
picked singers and eight hundred instruments gave the Marsellaise 
and other pieces; thirty-five hundred Frenchmen, accompanied by 
the Emperors hand, at another time, performed the finest pieces : 
yet he never in his life heard anything like the singing of the 
Richmond church of slaves in old Virginia, as they join in the 
choruses of their celebrated church melodies. I have heard 
Southern clergymen often say that the most pious men they had 
ever seen were negroes, and the most vigorous and prosperous 
churches in the United States are now— and have been for years — 
churches of black men and slaves; and, probably, they are also 
the largest churches in the whole world. One, in Beaufort, S. C, 
in 1857, numbered three thousand five hundred and eleven mem- 
bers, of whom live hundred and sixty-five had been baptised that 
year. That of Richmond, Va., is said to be nearly as large, and 
was, for some years, the largest church in America. One of our 
religious editors, in commenting on this most interesting state of 
facts, very properly laments the fact that, in such churches, " the 
hihle is withheld from the people, except through the medium of 
the priests' interpretation." I, too, greatly deplore such a fact ; 
but I have, also, right here, several special words to say about it : 
and the first is, that in this respect, the black man of America is 
really no worse off, and in some respects not as badly off, as the 
white man is, for neither are allowed in fact to receive the bible, 
except through the priests' interpretation. I have heard a great 
deal of gasconade about our open Protestant bibles, but I have 
never seen one of them yet. Nor do I believe there is any single 
church or communion in Christendom that would tolerate any man 
in receiving and applying the bible to himself and others, on the 
simple ground of those reiterated and self-evident principles on 
whicn the bible itself declares the whole of its own authority to be 
based. Thank God there are good and christian men and women 
in all the so-called churches ; but if there is a single church organ- 
ization in all Christendom, black or white, which the single gospel 
of Matthew would not utterly annihilate, if applied to it with even 
any tolerable honesty and consistency, I do not know where it is. 
And an open bible is the last of all things that the dead Corner- 



•11 

vatisms and Phariseeisms, of either the North or the South, would 
ever wish or should ever pray to see. An open bible would be to 
them what a waggish comrade was to an old negro, who was every 
night in the habit of praying, very loud, in his cabin, for the Lord 
"to send Gabriel to take him right straight up to Heaven." But 
one night this wag. while Tony was thus praying, rapped on the 
door, and said, in a very gram and doleful voice: "Here is 
Gabriel, come to take Tony right up to Heaven." Tony blowed 
out his light and jumped into lied in a trice, exclaiming, as he 
went : " Go and tell de Lord dat dat ar' nigger haint been seen in 
doc parts tor a whole three week- ! " Why is it worse to compel 
the black man to take the bible through the interpretation of a 
living "John Smith," whom be docs know, than to compel the 
white on.' to take it through a dead John Calvin, or John Wesley, 
or Westminster Assembly, whom be don't know; or through the 
petty sectarianisms and creed-mongers of his own day? And if 
this ecclesiastical master of the white man may shake hell-fire in 
the face of his pupil to dissipate bis doubts, why may not the mas- 
ter of the Mack man shake a harmless cow-skin, that cannot touch 
the soul, in bis face, to drive away his unbelief ? Iain sure that 
the "white cuffee' 7 and the "black cuffee" come nearer upon the 
platform of a twin brotherhood here than anywhere else, except 
that the poor black man has not yet risen to a point of culture and 
civilization in which books, of any sort, can be of much use, to any 

race; while the servile white man has, by the g Iness of God, 

already attained that point where the bible would be of great use 
t,, him, if he only could muster the manhood to dare to open it and 
read it for himself, in spite of his sect and his priest. But a wild 
lliall l ia - no more use for a book, of any sort, than a wild horse has 
tor a silver-mounted harness. Hooks are of no more real use, to 
multitudes even of our own people, who have them and can read 
them, than a treatise on fluxions would he to a Greenlander, or a 
parasol to a harvest hand. Some of them read only just enough 
to befool themselves, and others do not do even so much as that. 
God has never given hooks to any race of men until they were far 
advanced in their long career ot hereditary civilization. He did 
not give, even in form, the bible to any of our ancestral races, even 
after its institutions and truths were thrown all around them, till 
they had gone through a thousand years of pounding under a 

—7 



42 

despotism of the very priests who held it ; and even after all this 
severe discipline, they have by no means learned either to prize it, 
or to use it as they should. But as the people of Italy have, after 
all, got at the practical substance of the bible, without ever read- 
me- it, better than their priests have by reading it all the time, 
on the same principle the South Carolina negroes will at last get 
at it better than their masters, if indeed they have not done 
so already; and how long a discipline, of the same sort, the 
black race may require, I am not wise enough to detemine. 
I pray that they may so advance and so profit, that it may 
properly be a short one. I am well aware that theologians often 
ascribe such facts as these to Providential imbecility, miscalled 
forbearance, or some other learned name ; but I would rather have 
our " Old Public Functionary" at the head of the universe, than 
such a stupid and imbecile Divinity as these theologisms and eccle- 
siasticisms talk of. The Devil everywhere outwits him, or beats 
him at a fair game. He could not govern even South Carolina, let 
alone the rest of the universe. Although they say he is CxOing to 
do great things sometime — at least he is full of large promises 
about it — but his actual performance, so far as we have seen, has 
been quite small, indeed. But, I take it that the real God, both 
of the universe and of the bible, rules the world now, and always 
has done, in spite of the Devil and the ecclesiastics, too ; and He 
has never seen tit to give books to any barbarians yet — though I 
admit that it is fitting for us poor mortals to give them, together 
with all other good things, just as fast as we can, and then He will 
guide and control our. action to exactly right results. For He 
understands this mighty mystery of developing, or rather creating, 
out of nothing, intelligence, virtue, holiness and heaven, far better 
than we do. 

But we Anglo-Saxons are all laboring under the same mistake, 
in regard to the negro race, that the Egyptians of old were in re- 
gard to the Hebrews. Those old Pharaohs supposed God sent the 
Hebrews into Eypt to learn to make brick and build pyramids ; 
whereas he sent them there, not to fit them to make brick, but to 
make Bibles; a very silly and useless sort of a thing compared with 
the useful brick and magnificent pyramid, doubtless these old Phar- 
aoh's thought it, But we have got up a round or two on that lad- 
der. Still we suppose that the black man is sent here to raise cot- 



43 

ton and sugar, to perfect our calicoes and dresses, and sweeten our 
julips and teas. But God is schooling him to fill up and complete 
the measure of our literatures, freedoms and arts; our charities and 
devotions. Said the same Dr. Livingston, on the same occasion, 
"I have no doubt that these numerous black races are as much pre- 
served for purposes of mercy, as were God's ancient people, the 
Jews." Can any intelligent men donbt it l 

As respects their natural modes of civil order, then they must 
conform to these fundamental requisites of their character, and they 
can be really free; under no other order. On this point there are 
two extreme opinions in the United States; one would transform 
the negro into a democrat, and spread the dead level of democracy 
all <>ver the globe ; the other would forever hold him as a slave, and 
erect it> mis-called democracies over the volcano of negro slavery; 
if there is any truth in the views presented, both these extremes are 
equally absurd, for neither our present system of Southern slavery, 
nor democracy, furnish to the Equatorial man his own final proper 
sphere of action, of fbeedom, of loyalty and devotion, all of which, 
in combination, he as instinctively seeks, as the duck does its own 
native water; and we may set and hatch as many of these Equato- 
rial duck eggs under our own Northern democratic hens, as we 
please, either here or in Liberia, or elsewhere, but we shall never 
hatch out one single genuine democratic chicken; as soon as left to 
themselves they will all take to the institutions of their own native, 
sunny South. And with the exception of a few miserable abor- 
tions on this continent, and our present failure in Liberia, I believe 
that in the whole history of the world, there has never been an at- 
tempt, even to seek alter, much less to institute a Republic between 
the tropics. Even at the first discovery of this country, while all 
the Northern tribes were substantially democrats, all the tropical 
ones were monarchists; and the present races have already sunk, 
in fact, into the same order, if not in name. 

God has not experimented with monarchies for five thousand 
years for nothing; they are just as natural and necessary to the 
tropics and the Equator, as democracies are to the higher latitudes. 
And the same cons* ious personal freedom that leads the white man 
to choose to be governor by abstract laws, written on papers and 
parchments by political machinery of his own fixing and working, 
because he is by nature an abstractionist and a machinist, will as 



44 



naturally lead the black man to choose to be governed by concrete 
laws, written on the heart of a just, generous and concrete man, 
around whose person and presence, his own native sentiments of 
loyalty and devotion may find a full, free and healthful scope, 
both for culture and for action. Equal and stable democracies are 
the complex political machinery, of fertile and inventive brains ; 
the product of the head for the purposes of individual security, and 
self-culture and self-development, 

Just and magnificent empires are the spontaneous creations of 
great, devotional, loyal and magnanimous hearts, which sink and 
forget the egotism of self, in the glory and renown of the social 
whole ; christian purity and truth can give freedom to either, fit 
both alike to man, and consecrate both alike to God. Monarchy, 
therefore, the earliest and the most wide-spread political blossom of 
earth, is not to prove a barren sterility, an utter abortion ; but un- 
der christian freedom and christian inspiration to bring forth the 
choicest Equatorial fruits for the good of man and the glory of God. 
The black men of Africa are not only by nature monarchists, hav- 
ing a king or chief to follow and to adore, in every petty village, 
but it is said that four-fifths of the 'whole population quietly remain 
under their masters, as domestic slaves, even in those wilds where 
they could run away, or raise an insurrection any clay ; and outside 
of the influence of the American slave trade, so little injustice is 
done them, that a stranger cannot readily tell the slave from the 
master. How different, in fact, is this, from our present American 
system, though the same in name. Beside, the black man has not 
intellect enough to make a safe democrat, lie cannot be made to 
comprehend how the ''inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness, 1 ' in all men, should only define the right of the 
white man to catch and enslave negroes. How slavery is to be 
hated in the abstract-, and deified in the concrete, and finally, ex- 
tinguished by investing it with all concrete power, and spreading 
it over the whole continent. How a constitution ordained to "se- 
cure and perpetuate liberty and Union,' 1 should be used only to 
catch stray negroes with, or to mob, outlaw, whip, club down, tar 
and feather, hang and murder free white men, women and chil- 
dren ; to ferment treason and disunion, till all liberty, all Union, 
and all law and government on earth, become a mockery and a 
by-word. How we save the Union every four years by electing 



45 

some Northern doughface, or some Southern fire-eater to swear to 
these self-evident truths, and politically to execute them at the cap- 
ital — all this the black could not be made to understand ; and should 
he attempt to execute it, his weak head, and his great swelling 
Equatoeial heaet would lead him sadly astray; for to do all this, 
DOt only requires a man that has a very "big head,'' but he should 
also be more utterly destitute of all heart than a crocodile; and this 
the black man i- not. 

But to illustrate further my point: I suppose, if it were left 
perfectly free to all the negroes today, either to remain with their 
masters, astheyare, or to go out five, among those who have really 
kind masters, i doubt not, thai even now, under our appalling 
. ode of slave laws, such is the extreme tendency of their nature 
to sentiment, Loyalty and devotion, that multitudes would choose 
t«« remain where they are, inconceivable as all this is to us; where- 
as, if our laws protected them and their property, in family, life and 
limb, to even any decent extent, I have no doubt that under such 
a choice, the va-t majority of them would stay where they are. 
But yon probably could not find one single white man, on two 
whole continent-, however debased or inured to despotism at home, 
that would make such a choice. 

Nor doe- this fact show so much the degradation of the black 
race a- is sometimes -aid. a- it does the radical and instinctive dif- 
ference of the two races; a difference so great that it is Impossible 
for a- to comprehend, much less to sympathize with the other race. 
And it i- this conscious difference in b ldk ax chaeactee and ulti- 
m\ti. destiny, not a mere difference of color, that throws a great 
and impassible gulf between the two races. We might a- reason- 
ably expect the wolf and the house-dog to see alike and act alike, 
and voluntarily to choose the same kennel or lair. I do not deny 
that the mere color is repulsive to us, or at least distasteful — 
:lll ,l rightfully to for if there were a race of women on this conti. 
,,ent with scarlet rednoses, there would be lots of old maids among 
them in spite of a common Christianity, and the Declaration of In- 
dependence thrown in to boot. Now, if we were all made angels, 
and did not care for color, all this reasoning about its being a mere 
prejudice, might be very nice ; but so long as we are but men, and 
do, and must care for it, it is all very shallow. 



46 

The venerable Dr. Livingston testifies, in his work, that at one 
time he himself became so black while on the low lands of Africa, 
that the natives would not believe that he had ever been a white 
man, till he stripped up his sleeve and showed them his protected 
skin. He affirms also, that in those regions, a white man appeared 
decidedly distasteful and repugnant to him, so far as the color was 
concerned. This frank confession indicates two things, both of 
which we should naturally expect, namely : that by ordinance of 
God, both healthful color, and healthful and natural taste, changes 
with the different climes ; thus laying an immovable foundation for 
distinct varieties of races, colors, and tastes, instead of a dead uni- 
formity of either. And I think all those democrats who feel that 
they are in danger of marrying black women ought to be allowed 
to prohibit themselves and their friends, by enacted law, though 
such a law is quite needless for most people. But this matter of 
mere color is not all, nor is it the chief ground of our repugnance, 
for we do sympathize with the Indian, and with occasional speci- 
mens of the African race, in spite of color, in whom we find the 
same indomitable will, as in ourselves ; and it is impossible for 
any human being to respect, or at least to sympathize with any 
quality in another, which he does not find in himself. The negro 
cannot be taught to swear, fight and cypher equal to the Anglo- 
Saxon, and, therefore, he can have no respect for him, however 
faithfully he may serve, worship, pray, and adore. 

But to bring all to the concrete : Take as a full grown Northern 
man, Napoleon Bonaparte ; and as a full grown Equatorial man, 
"Uncle Tom," for I am not acquainted with any similar real char- 
ter, though Southern gentlemen of undoubted veracity, assure me 
that they have often seen such at the South. Now, this "Uncle 
Tom" had not what we call intellect enough in his head to sub- 
serve the necessities of Napoleon's little finger. But if Napoleon's 
heart, on the other hand, had been beaten out as fine as gold leaf, 
it would not all have made a sizable case for Uncle Tom's great 
Equatorial heart, ever full of love and of grace, and ever pouring 
a full tide of divine and heavenly wisdom up into his head, so that 
there was no need, no room for what we call mere intellect there. 
No more than the electric battery, that draws its full charge from 
the clouds, needs the gyrations of some petty human machine. It 
is true, logic is good, but there are powers of the human soul that 
transcend all the possibilities of a bare logic. Now, any man who 



47 

should assert that this Uncle Tom was a higher specimen of true 
manhood than Napoleon Bonaparte would perhaps be deemed in- 
sane. And yet, if Christ's teaching, and the whole of Christianity 
from beginning to end, is not all a sheer fable, it is even so ; and 
Uncle Tom's character will prove not only the higher, but in the 
long run infinitely the stronger, and more dominant and all-control- 
ling character ot the two ; and I am not sure but the bare imaginary 
conception of it, is yet destined to work greater and more desirable 
changes on this continent, than all Napoleon's power could on the 
continent of Europe. For "blessed are the meek, for they shall 
inherit the earth — not Heaven — but the earth, and strain, and 
pervert the old prophecy as you will, that '"Canaan should be ser- 
vant of all," the oft-repeated prophesies of Jesus, who is greater 
than Noah, that "he he who is servant of all, shall, in the end, 
become 'geeatest and masiik of all,' " must needs be fulfilled. 
And do \w not even now see, that this despised negro race are 
gathering around them, like a wall of eternal fire, the highest, and 
holiest, and strongest sympathies and sentiments of the most chris- 
tian and civilized races of earth. In some aspects, mere weakness, 
even like that of the infant, is the strongest thing on the face of the 
earth; and the careless killing of a half-dozen children about 
Charleston, might now, make as more trouble than the slaughter 
of fifty thousand armed soldiers. Mere logics, customs, conven- 
tionalisms, prejudices and passions, are very small affairs, and may 
either freeze or perish in a day. J!ut these instinctive and undying 
sentiments of the human soul, when once aroused, are truly terri- 
ble. "Woe, \\oc to the rider that would trample them down." 

The reason, then, in brief, why the two races cannot dwell 
together, is not one of mere color. It is — -first, because God never 
designed that they should, as we shall soon see; and second, 
because each race is still essentially barbarian in the only line in 
which the other has begun to be civilized — the one in head, and 
the other in heart— and thus they must remain till long after their 
separation will come. Hence there is no solid ground of mutual 
sympathy and co-operation between them. All the black man's 
social work here is as totally unnatural to him as the bricks without 
straw were to the Hebrews, and must ever remain so. For his 
home and his great work is not here, but between the tropics; 
while the social and civil order that he craves is just as distasteful 



V 

48 

and imsuited to ns. For, made as we are, and destined to what 
we are, should we attempt to live with him in his sunny home, 
under the wisest, and best, and freest institutions he could possibly 
create or endure, it would be to us a practical slavery, an inevitable 
crippling and dwarfing of all our natural powers and energies, 
however kindly he might treat us. For him to do the same with 
us must as inevitably result in the same thing. Shame on us, 
th en — yea, ten thousand shames on us — if we cannot treat him 
kindly, nor yet humanly, while Providence permits him to remain. 
We are barbarians in heart ; he never treated us so, in his own 
native home. 

Did space allow, it would be pertinent here to remark on the 
cause of that peculiar ease and grace of manners which the unpre- 
judiced traveler perceives, as soon as he passes the lines of one of 
our great slave States. This is one effect — a sort of reaction of 
the great equatorial heart of the black man, though degraded and 
enslaved, even upon the heart and manners of his master. I refer 
not now to the haughty insolence of the slaveholder, when in 
anger, or when assuming superiority — which habit is a direct effect 
of slavery itself, and, if possible, more detestable and disgusting 
than the cause which produced it; but I refer to his quiet and 
graceful ease, so charming when he is in repose, which is an effect 
of his association with the black man as a comrade, and which I 
do admire, though we of the North strive in vain to rival, or even 
successfully to imitate it. 

But is it asked again, which of these two races is superior ? I 
answer, both, for the purpose and the place for which God made 
them, and both inferior for any other place. And here the black 
man is inferior, just as we should soon be in Greenland, simply 
because he is out of his own sphere and place. And if ever our 
women should change places and spheres with us, they would soon 
fall under the same disgust and contempt, because they would be 
at work in a sphere they could not fill ; and if physical nature does 
not abhor a vacuum, still human nature abhors such a monstrosity; 
and whenever woman has been thus thrust out of her sphere, she 
has ever been held in disgust and contempt, as a mere slave, for 
the same reason, and ever must be. 



CHAPTER IV. 



"We are now prepared, perhaps, with some degree of intelligence, 
to ask and to answer the questions, why did the black man come 
here \ and how and where shall he go? In our former survey of 
the continents, we left these two races, the white at the North, and 
the black at the South, of the Mediterranean Sea, each having 
traversed the whole breadth of his own continent, from the East to 
the West — the one having tilled the European, the other the Afri- 
can end of this continent with its own peculiar people and arts, till, 
with their modes of lite, both seemed pressed for room — we left 
them, I say, thus standing on the "Western verge of their individual 
homes, totally unconscious of each other's existence, and both 
looking, as it were, wishfully to some unknown land — some new 
home in the far West, in the bosom of the great, dread, mysterious 
and unknown Atlantic. The fortunate and timely hanging of a 
little bit of iron on a pivot, called the mariner's compass, by the 
intermediate Portuguese race, unexpectedly introduced these two 
races to each other, and to their new home in the "West, and opened 
all Africa and all America to the astonished gaze of the civilized 
world. These two races at first shook hands, and turned their 
eves Westward. There they stand, these two mighty races, nur- 
tured apart, on the two extremes of earth, and of climate, and one 
of them nursed in secret for thousands of years. The white man, 
with his wonted agility, starts at once for his new home in the 
North of this new-found and new-born world. But the black man 
still gazes in stupid and helpless amazement upon the glorious land 
of the Amazon, already opening wide its ocean mouth, and throw- 
ing far abroad over a whole continent its mighty arms, to receive 
and embrace him. But the Africans have neither ships, nor 
money, nor arts, and they cannot cross. "God has surely made a 
mistake now," says the skeptic; "he has made the race in Africa, 
—8 



50 

and the lands to receive them in America, all right ; but they can 
not cross the sea— they can never meet." Hush ! hush ! " Thou 
shalt make even the wrath of man to praise thee, and the remainder 
thereof shalt thou restrain." So it was of old, and this Scripture 
is not out of date yet. The white man has ships, and money, and 
skill, in abundance ; but he is the universal Yankee of the globe, 
and was never known to work for either God or man for nothing ; 
and if he brings them over he must have pay — cash down. Well, 
he brought them, and he has taken terrible pay ; and now he ought 
to be satisfied, and love mercy, and do justice. 

It is interesting here to note that about this time the most Chris- 
tian and civilized nations of Europe, as if impelled by the frenzy 
of some malicious demon, all united in capturing and plundering 
the black man, and bringing him across the Atlantic, and colonizing 
him in the United States, and in Brazil, and on the islands, on all 
sides of his new Amazonian home, until almost three millions were 
found in each country. Then the same nations, as if inspired of 
God, without changing a single cardinal truth of either their polity 
or faith, all as one, set to to denounce and punish their own practices 
as a felony and a piracy. So far did this proceed, that at one time 
the best of men could see no wrong in the traffic, and at the other 
the worst could find no apology for it. There is no accounting for 
the action and logic of men on this subject. Even we ourselves 
still call trafficking in negroes piracy on the water, and democracy 
on the land. I say there is no accounting for these and similar 
facts, except that God wanted about twelve millions over here on 
either side of this equatorial home of the black man in Brazil ; and 
now they are here, no more are wanted from Africa, while it is still 
needful to push those of the North down South, which the overland 
slave trade is constantly doing, and is therefore permitted ; and if 
this divine reason does not lay at the bottom of those most unac- 
countable discordances and inconsistencies of all faith, all logic, all 
charity and all law combined, surely no human reason does. 

Again : Till about the same time, all these United States alike 
held slaves, and all alike, the North as well as the South, tolerated 
slavery. The best of men in the North saw no particular harm in 
it, and all sustained and strengthened, not simply tolerated, each 
other in the practice. Slaves were then thought as proper and 
useful at the North as at the South. But all of a sudden this 



51 

scene, too, changes ; and every influence of God, of Nature, of 
men, and of devils, seemed to conspire to crowd the three millions 
of slaves in the United States down South, toward their final home; 
while similar co-operating causes have operated in South America 
to push them up North toward the same spot. Some Northern 
States emancipated and sold South. Several States still raise 
slaves and sell South. The Southern State filibuster, fight, nego- 
tiate and secede, to gain territory — Texas, Mexico, Cuba, Central 
America — in order to push slaves still further South. Northern 
men — Democrats, Republicans and Christians — compromise, enact 
ordinances and platforms, pray, emigrate by thousands, and even 
fight, to keep slavery from spreading toward the North. But, 
strange again, as it logically seems, they will resist to the death the 
addition of a single slave State toward the North, while they will 
quietly acquiesce in the addition of a dozen on the South — only 
barely making just fuss enough about it to make themselves believe 
there is some consistency in their action : just as boys whistle in 
the dark, to keep their own courage up. But God works by still 
more effective means; for he smites every Northern soil with bar- 
renness and with curses, on which the slave is permitted too long 
to linger, and thus drives them South by the accumulating deluge 
of desolation in their rear, as he drove the Israelites out of Egypt 
by closing in the Red Sea behind them. True, all this will not be 
done in an hour, nor in a single generation, God has never pur- 
posed nor promised that he would complete this great equatorial 
work of the globe — the final crowning work of all lands, races and 
acres — a nd usher in the final sonj>; of earth's jubilee that is to 
encircle the globe, in a single generation. And, fret as we may, 
he will take his own time for it ; oppose or help as we may, he will 
at last do his own work in his own way, and do it so, too, that all 
shall pronounce it " good," " very good." 

Now, if these and all accordant facts do not show the finger of 
God in this whole matter, from Ham's day down to our own, and 
intimate the final destiny of the black man and our highest duty 
toward him, I do not know what could show it. In my view it 
takes no more of a prophet or of a wise man to see that the black 
man will go to the valley of the Amazon, whether we will or no, 
than it does to see that the white man will remain in the United 
States, or that the Amazon will run into the sea. 



52 

Brazil is, at this very hour, substantially a black empire. There 
were, in 1850, in the country, about one million of weak and 
degenerate Portuguese and mixed Portuguese. These, at present, 
hold the supremacy of power, while the supremacy of numbers — 
of population — is hopelessly against them. Pitted against them, 
in the contest for power, there are already more than a million of 
strong, robust, warlike, free blacks, Indians and half-breeds ; while 
in the contest for the supremacy of numbers, there must be added 
to these more than three million of slaves, daily increasing with 
astonishing rapidity,® both by birth and by emigration. The 
reigning house is equally illustrious for its prestige, its sagacity 
and its comprehensive philanthropy and humanity. The world 
could not furnish a better sovereign for those mixed races, if they 
desired one; and, fortunately, they have no disposition to desire it. 
The practical administration, in several respects, is more free and 
more perfect than our own ; and, for that place and people, better 
than any known civilized government on earth. Hence the aston- 
ishing development and progress of the country in the past few 
years. It is, at all points, as favorable to the black man as to the 
white, and much more congenial to his nature. Amalgamation is 
common, and even encouraged by law. All religion is free. The 
press is free : far more so than it is in the United States. Great 
attention is being paid to the development of a system of free 
schools — to foreign commerce and foreign emigration ; while the 
African slave trade is now wholly suppressed, and the actual con- 
dition of existing slaves ameliorated as fast as it can be done. In 
the last half century Brazil has quietly swallowed up the little 
republics on her Northern border, just as we have the monarchies 
on our Southern border, until, without war, noise or uproar, she 
has come into safe and permanent possession of a territory larger 
than all Western Europe, fourteen times as large as France, larger 
than the whole United States by 68,294 square miles, and, in per- 
manent natural resources, worth a dozen just such countries as ours; 
and it is steadily rising toward an empire that will, in the end, 
eclipse all other empires on the face of the earth in its wealth, its 
splendor, its numbers and its power. 

"Why quarrel longer over our black people, or try in vain to jilt 
them back to Africa, when by sending them to Brazil we could 
confer an inestimable blessing upon the whole world in the devel- 



53 

opment of the resources of that unique and glorious empire, and in 
the end increase our own safety, wealth, commerce, glory and 
power a thousand fold more than we can by retaining them here; 
and place the African in his own native, final home. We have 
hundreds of thousands of free blacks in the United States and 
in Canada that might go to-morrow, with infinite advantage to 
themselves and to all others, at home and abroad. I will reiterate 
■ — because it is as certain as the laws of God and of nature — that 
nothing can surpass the glory and the grandeur of the future 
history of the black race in Brazil, let who Avill rule them; for 
whoever holds the supremacy in power, they will always hold it 
in numbers so decided and strong, that that power must be exerted 
substantially for their good. 

But there is the half-way house, in Ilayti, to which they even 
now offer to pay the passage of all our free blacks who will go, 
give each family a farm of the richest land in the world, when 
they get there, and guarantee to them all civil and social privileges. 
Much the same is true of Central America, and even of Southern 
Mexico. Since these lectures were first written and delivered, 
now some year- ago, most of these governments have offered forty 
acres of land gratis to all black men, of good character, who will 
come to them ; and the Providential developments, on all hands, 
toward such a final result as was there predicted, and thought, at 
thai time, by some, to be wholly chimerical, have been so rapid, 
wide- spread and resistless, as not only to astonish the writer, but 
even the whole world at large. It has now become absolutely 
childish tbr us to be halting, and doubting, and bickering, and 
quibbling over the final and proper destiny of the black man any 
longer. The finger of Almighty God has not only written it on 
the continents and the ages, from which alone it could be deciphered 
when this view was first suggested to an audience of half fearing, 
half hoping, and therefore willing hearers, but he has now chroni- 
cled it in our surrounding policies, histories and laws, in speeches, 
gazettes and, above all, in «»ur unutterable necessities. "What class 
of men on the face of the earth can such a policy injure? Nay, 
wdiat class will it not most obviously benefit? Will it harm Africa? 
Brazil will do more for Africa than Africa can possibly do for her- 
self alone ; just as this country has done more for Europe than a 
thousand Italics or Spains could have done. Will it injure the free 



54 

black, the slave or the master ? I shall show, hereafter, that it is 
the only possible earthly hope of either. Will it injure the com- 
merce, or the wealth, or the Union, or endanger the safety of the 
Republic 1 ISTo man will say it. And, if not the only hope of 
either, it is, at least, by far the most cheering one the far distant 
future can present to us. 



CHxVPTER V 



In view of these tacts, what shall we do ? We may, in general, 
like christian freemen, by all the means God has put in our power, 
aid, instruct and comfort our sable brother in his pilgrimage toward" 
the far South, and thus prepare him for his new home and final 
glorious destiny there. If so, our own destiny and our own glory 
will be unrivalled past all power of human speech to express. 

On the other hand, we may abuse, crush, trample and torture 
him as he goes: deny him all natural rights, simply because we 
have the power : scourge the race and desolate the earth, and 
explode the volcanoes of eternal justice beneath our own feet, till 
our own freedom is a hopeless wreck — our own strength and wis- 
dom a strength for suicide — an infatuation that arms the race of 
man and the omnipotence of God against us — till at last this once 
patient but now phrensied and despairing man, skilled in the arts 
of his torment ore, and aided and abetted by all the monarchies of 
the elobe, shall burst forth from the kennels in which we have 
caged him, to reek upon our institutions, and kindred, and homes 
the unutterable vengeance of his own unrequited wrong — the 
justice of the ever-living God. For God still reigns; not away up 
among the stars, and the eternities and the dogmas, but down in 
the rice swamps and cotton and cane fields, over those sable souls, 
that still cry, from beneath the altar, w * How long, oh, Lord, how 
lone ( " And what shall we do if we at last provoke him to exe- 
cute his higher law, not in suffering mercy, but in avenging wrath. 
But to be more specific : 

I. The slave states of the South can so readjust their state laws 
as to protect, both in theory and in fact, all the natural rights of 
the black man, while the master still holds his superior relation to 
him and all needtul control over him; and the only possible way 
to render the slave safe, contented and happy, and useful to his 



56 

master and to the world, is for the state to interfere as he rises in 
the scale of intelligence, to correct, in his behalf, admitted abuses, 
and to protect him against the abuses of cruel and unreasonable 
masters. The state, in its own sovereignty, and majesty, should 
assume his guardianship and efficient protection against all such 
unreasonable abuse. And unless this is done, the civilized world 
will become arrayed against the whole system. 

II. Individual masters can, meantime, treat their slaves with 
so much christian kindness and humanity, that with their proclivi- 
ties toward sentiment and devotion, they would not leave them if 
they could, until both parties see that it is for the good of each ; 
and should that time ever come, then they would part in love and 
peace, and no wrong or violation of freedom be done to either ; for 
the fundamental idea of freedom includes the right of choosing to 
serve a just and upright man, as truly as it does the right to choose 
to obey a just and upright abstract law. And according to the true 
idea of freedom given on a preceding page, any master can, at any 
time, make his slave really free, without manumission, and without 
either aid or opposition from the state ; for he can place him at once 
in a spere of action and enjoyment suited to his capacities and 
wants, if he is not there already ; and that is all the rational liberty 
that any living creature can either have or claim. I am aware that 
one party will cite the West India emancipation, and the other, St. 
Domingo, to refute and rebut the above suggestions, forgetting 
that it was the awful negligence of the state, and the appalling 
abuses and cruelties of the masters, that precipitated the catastro- 
phe of slavery, in both of these cases alike ; and if any state would 
avoid such an end, it must turn out of the road that inevitably leads 
to it. The cruelties and necessary abuses that there arose, under 
absentee landlords, and irresponsible overseers, destroyed all natur- 
al sympathy between master and servant, forcing the slave to see 
and feel that their masters cared nothing, whatever for their real in- 
terests and welfare, and throwing them into that condition of com- 
bined disgust and despair, in which the weakest of mortals is capa- 
ble of the most terrible desperation and revenge. May God deliver 
our own states from such cruel and suicidal folly and infatuation. 
There are but two possible causes that can ever terminate slavery 
in these states ; the one is the despair of the black man ; the other 
is the wisdom and benevolence of the white one. The one is hor- 



57 

rible even to think of, the other is the most beautiful and glorious 
subject the mind can contemplate. The one comes by first making 
the master a brute, and the slave a consequent demon ; the other 
comes by making the master a virtual parent and guardian, and 
the slave a dutiful and faithful son, or ward, rising in the scale of 
being by the slow, but sure process of hereditary civilization, as 
their generations pass away, till finally prepared to leave their fa- 
ther's home, more in sorrow than in joy, to enter their new home, 
and assume the burden and cares of life for themselves. What 
more beautiful or blessed sight can there be upon earth, than that 
of millions of men passing from barbarism to civilization under such 
a process as this; and though their growth be slow, like that of the 
forest oaks, it is still the growth of nature and of God, and, there- 
fore, resistless and sure. Southern writers and speakers boast of 
what they have already done for the black man in this line, and of 
the civilization he has already achieved, under their care, imperfect, 
and even cruel, as it often lias been. I do not doubt, either as re- 
gards the fact or the true philosophy of the progress. And it is 
on this very ground that I would urge with all the vehemence of 
truth and its own eloquence, the immediate, and constant, and in- 
dispi nsable readjustment of their proper sphere of action and 
enjoyment to suit their new condition, and their new wants, both 
on the part of the State and the master, as the only hope of either 
the white or the black man in the South; for otherwise^ the slave 
must at last, sooner or later, be driven to sunder his bondage in 
despair and in Mood. But before that time comes, he will have 
been rendered totally worthless to his master; their mutual aliena- 
tion and distrust will render the cost of securing and guarding his 
reluctant labor more than the labor itself can possibly be worth, 
aside from the hourly impending danger of the final doom; for 
only the very lowest forms of humanity can possibly be made to 
work under the stimulus of tear alone. As they rise in intelligence 
and practical capacity, they must be more and more allured by the 
incitements of hope. How heroically McDonald's slaves wrought 
under one form of this hope \ and how bravely others are still work- 
ing under other forms of it. Xow, that the same laws and customs 
which were in their own nature fitted, or at least were thought to 
be needful for the slave, when he was nothing but a mere bar- 
barian, and could be addressed by no motive but fear, should be 



58 

fitted to him, now, if he really lias advanced in civilization, as is 
claimed for him, is, in itself, a sheer absurdity, contradicted by all 
possible modes of human reason, experience and observation. The 
South are everywhere complaining that their slaves ake becoming 
uneasy ; and they attribute the fact to the abolitionists of the 
North. They might as well ascribe it to the ice around the North 
pole. No, the real cause lies much nearer home, and is much more 
creditable to the individual master, than all this supposes. It lies, 
in the fact, that in spite of the severity, and barbarism, and cruelty 
of the old and formal law of the state, masters have, in fact, in gen- 
eral, treated their slaves with so good a degree of humanity, that 
they have risen, in spite of many obstacles, in civilization, and 
in the scale of being, and consequently, have outgrown the bar- 
barism of the law at sundry points, and feel its injustice with 
necessarily increasing abhorrence and disgust. Such a result is, 
and was, and forever will be, as inevitable as the motion of the 
earth on its orbit, ; and depends just as little on the harangues and 
appeals of mortal men of any sort. Exclude all men on the face of 
the earth from the slave states, but the slaveholders only, and 
this process will inevitably go on, just the same as before; and all 
the mere talk in the universe cannot arrest it, nor yet materially ad- 
vance it, for it is based on an unvarying law of the Infinite God, 
and we might as well talk for or against the rolling of the spheres. 
It cannot be even legislated against, only in one way ; and that is 
a system of espionage, and distrust, and force ; and cruel appeal to 
bare fear, can be instituted, so ferocious and cruel, as to reduce the 
coming generations of slaves to their original condition of utter and 
unmitigated barbarism, and all manhood be again so thoroughly 
crushed out of them, by tyranny and fear, that they feel easy un- 
der the old and barbarous law, just as an ox would, because they 
have shrunk beneath, instead of having risen above its provi- 
sions. Men ! white men, free men of the South, will you do this ? 
We know you will not, and cannot ; and, therefore, the other is the 
only alternative open to you. For hope, hope, soul-inspiring hope, 
is the great want of their present condition ; and their best minds 
will gradually seize hold of it, however remote in the future it may 
lay, as the crushed man still clings to his hope of Heaven. 

There is terrible reason to fear that the black man is really sink- 
ing from simple despair. Our revolutionary fathers kept up their 



50 

hope, and their consequent attachment and allegiance, by assuring 
them, by act and word, that their present condition is only tempo- 
rary. The colonization scheme renewed and reinspired this hope- 
Both were totally illusive and impracticable; for the blacks never 
can be emancipated here, nor carried back to Africa. So now they 
have no national hope — no hope ! ! Most merciful God ! Are so 
many millions of thy toiling children to be left longer on earth 
with no hope — no hope for themselves, or for their children? It 
cannot be; or, if it is allowed to be, it will create a hell upon earth 
before many years roll around. Say then at once to the black man, 
that it' he is faithful to his duty, to himself and to his race, there is 
f<>r him in the far future a hope, more glorious than the mind can 
conceive, even, in this world, and an eternal hope nearer by, in the 
world to come. Say not it will do him no good. Such sources of 
national hope inspire, and cheer, and encourage all living men, 
and most of all, men bordering on the verge of despair. Such a 
course will mend again the sundered cords of sympathy and 
fidelity — of attachment and devotion between master and slave — as 
no force, and no fear, and no unfeeling severity and cruelty can 
ever do — and mend them, too, beyond the power of all the aboli- 
tionists in the world to sunder them, even if they should desire to 
do it. Do you say that the hope of heaven supplies this want? 
It <\<n'< not; it cannot doit. It is good, yea, above all estimate, in 
its place; hut it sustains and cheers only the spiritual man, in his 
spiritual relations and duties. But every man on earth needs, also, 
and must have, a distinctively earthly hope, for himself or for his 
posterity, or he will, by its want, be transformed into a beast or a 
demon. Give, then, to the black man, first of all, a hope for him- 
self and his children, on earth, however remote it may lie in the 
distant future, if you would Mill keep him a man — a glorious, 
kaim ni.v, national iiope. It belongs to him ; it is his due. Not 
a hope in the North, or the free States, or in Canada — for there is 
no more rational hope for the black man there than there is in 
Greenland or Labrador — but a new, and soul-inspiring, and glorious 
hope in his own sunny South, his natural Equatorial home, the 
land of the great river, and the boundless fertile fields, which God 
has laade for him, has he not ? For whom, then, did he make 
that most glorious of all lands? Was it only for the crocodile and 
the alligator 2 or was it for the white man? But he cannot possi- 



60 

bly live there. Who, then, was it for? Will he create a new race 
of black men ? No : it is for our present black men. They are 
now only preparing for their new home. Let but this new hope 
inspire the soul of the black man, and let only moderately reasona- 
ble justice be done him, while he must remain in his school at the 
North, and we shall soon hear less of despairing and therefore 
reluctant and uneasy slaves, and consequent nervous and fright- 
ened masters. And it is equally beneath the dignity and the duty 
of the South to be fretting and stewing about a few Northern abo- 
litionists, who have no access to their slaves, no more than a man 
in the moon, and could not materially change them if they had ; 
while the great and solemn issues of the case are now, as ever 
before in the history of the world, wholly under their own eyes, 
and in their own hands. Does not all the world know, already, 
that the anxiety, and fear, and alarm of the masters is far greater 
in those remote States where abolitionists never go, than it is in 
those States where they most often go, and where their influence 
is most felt? True, most slaves run away from the Northern 
States; but that is merely owing to two causes: first, because, 
under a temporary impulse or abuse, it is easier to do so ; and 
second, because they are always suspicious and fearful of being- sold 
South sooner or later. Thus even the Northern negroes them- 
selves, stupid as they are, have learned to see and to fear that very 
despotism under. which some propose to crush the black men of 
the extreme South. But will a great and vital political tact, that 
has become so plain that even the Northern negroes can read it — 
shall it escape the notice and the needful action of Southern demo- 
crats and statesmen ? We trust not. Our faith both in God and 
man bears us above such an appalling and despairing view, all 
present appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 

It is abundantly within the power of the South, any day — with- 
out in the least impairing the rightful authority of the master, or 
the pecuniary value of the services of the slaves, or the security of 
society, but greatly confirming, enhancing and securing all these 
together — to place the black man in a condition of practical freedom, 
usefulness and contentment, as great and as hopeful as any other 
class of men, of the same grade of civilization, ever enjoyed upon 
the face of the earth ; and by doing this, they would at once elevate 
in the scale of moral being both the white and the black man, pre- 



61 

pare the latter for his final home in the far South, and command 
and secure to themselves the sympathy, the respect, and the lasting 
esteem of mankind. But if they will not do this, they must, in 
common with all who have gone before them, take what must and 
will inevitably come: a despotism or an anarchy both for them- 
selves and their children. That is — to revert to a former simile — 
they must themselves go into the hopper; for foam, and fret, and 
stew, and resist, as we, any, or all of us may, God's great and eter- 
nal mill for the elevation and civilization of the races will not stop 
its work ; and when any race, black or white, fall evidently bfilow 
the required standard of work and of duty, it will take them, too, 
uj), and grind them over, till they come again up to the mark, the 
standard required. And to my mind, these extreme Southern fire- 
eaters, as well as the opposite extremes in the North, seem to be 
hopping in, between the burr-stones, just as fast as they can. That 
they need a new grinding there can be no doubt; and could they 
take; it alone, no reasonable man would object; but the fear is that 
they may draw multitudes along with them, both North and South, 
who are really, by themselves, deserving of a better fate. 

I have, it will be observed, nowhere inquired whether the Scrip- 
tun- sanction slavery or not : first, because no possible book can 
make anything either right or wrong, that was not so in its own 
nature, before either the book or the world itself was made; and 
secondly, because the Scriptures, if either true to fact or true to 
nature, as I believe they are, musl sanction all those kinds and 
degrees of servitude that have been found, in all ages, indispensable 
to the civilization of mankind; and they must as clearly repel and 
condemn all forms and modes of servitude which tend only to the 
perpetuation and the production of barbarism. But as our Ameri- 
can slavery includes both — namely, a system of law, under the 
State, that tends only to barbarism, and a system of practical 
administration, under* a vast many, if not under the majority of 
masters, which, in spite of the law, tends to civilization — the Scrip- 
tures, if true to God and man, must boldly condemn the one, and 
as boldly tolerate the other; and so they do; and it is easy for a 
sophist to cite passages and examples, on either side, of the am- 
biguous and unanalyzed word slavery, all day long, which most 
clearly either approve or condemn it, just as the ecclesiastical ma- 
gician chooses. But a rational man would as soon ask whether the 



62 

Bible approves of " killing " as of " slavery ;" for in each case it 
depends wholly on the kind of killing, and the kind of slavery; 
for God does not fight mere words and wind, however odious they 
may become ; and all this noise and tumult about the relations of 
the Bible to slavery must ever remain, like most other ecclesiastical 
disputes, a mere war of words and of wind, till the .complex word 
"slavery " is analyzed into its distinct parts. Then it will be found 
that God has, in all ages, approved of some things included in the 
general and complex term slavery, and disapproved of others ; for 
God is neither deceived nor governed by mere big words, as men 
are. 

Mexico and several of the Central American states, it is said, 
have recently offered forty acres of land, gratis, to all emigrants, 
without distinction of color. The whole vast country of Brazil, the 
black man's natural home, is, as we have seen, even more open, as 
well as more congenial to him than to the white man ; and it is 
within the power of the Union, and of the states, to make immedi- 
ate provisions for the ample colonization of our free blacks and 
emancipated slaves, into these regions, at far less cost than in Afri- 
ca, and infinitely more to the present and ultimate advantage of 
the black man and his race. For South America would thus be 
made to Africa what North America is now to Europe; just what 
it would seem that God ultimately designed that it should be. But 
that all this must take place only by slow degrees, and be fully re- 
alized only after we, and perhaps many other generations are dead, 
is no more objection to the policy than the same obstacles were to 
the policy of colonizing this Northern continent when it was first 
discovered. And considering the rapid progress of the facilities of 
transit, and of commerce ; the surprising recent development of 
those rural implements and machines, by the aid of which, the re- 
sources of that rich country can now be developed, and its wildness 
subdued, as it was not possible that it ever could have been before ; 
considering the results of our recent explorations and reports, and 
of the vast stream of emigration and of labor, both black and white, 
that by new discoveries and new enticements, social emigration, 
and political agitation, and a multitudinous array of combined 
causes, is now being poured down toward the Equator, in a con- 
stantly accumulating torrent ; I say, considering all these, and simi- 
lar facts, too numerous even to allude to here, we may even now 



63 

be nearer to the glorious goal of our effort and hope than many of 
our "slow coaches" suspect ; the moral world does not now simply 
revolve, as in olden time; it whirls, and "buzzes," and "whizzes," 
and "sissies," out of every crevice, and crack, and joint, for God 
has got the steam fully up to the fair running point ; and three or 
four million of negroes on board, to be carried only across the Mexi- 
can gulf, are hardly enough for the train to stop for; we shall pro- 
bably have to throw in several hundred-thousand white men, to en- 
sure the certainty of a sure and feasable passage. But even, if for 
a time, they should control, they can never populate the Brazils; 
and if they control it justly, they will control it no longer than it 
i- best that they sin Mild ; and in such a climate, and in such a vast, 
open and peculiar country, a very unjust or cruel control is, for any 
length of lime, simply an impossibility. For God has taken good 
can- to make South America all right, in the outset, for the unique 
and peculiar pail she is to play in the history and civilization of 
man. 

It would well pay the government now to pay a fair price for all 
the slaves on the border states, that are willing to go, and colonize 
them, either in Central or South America, or in Hayti, under some 
sort of government or guardianship suited to their condition ; and 
encourage as many free blacks as possible to go with them, from 
the other .-tat'-. Both the safety of the Union and the slave pro- 
perty, to,,, as well as all other property in the Union, would be in- 
creased by the operation, for reasons that will be. more fully sug- 
gested, as we proceed to other aspects of our subject. 

The cotton states have no reason to apprehend a scarcity of labor 
from any Mich policy. For it* they would diversify their crops, 
raise com, wheat, mules, pork and stock, whenever the can, for 
their own consumption, and introduce the best implements of the 
free states for the culture of all these, and of their cotton, too, one 
hand would be found as effective as two or three now are, in the 
simple cultivation of the crop; and in picking time, they could send 
to their large cities, by railroad or otherwise, and get gangs of idle 
hands to come and pick cotton by the pound, or by the day, at far 
less cost, than it now takes to buy negroes, and keep them the 
year round, merely, or mostly, for that brief service. If white 
hands were obtained, they might work in fields, or in gangs, 
wholly apart from the negroes ; and thousands might, by a little 



64 

effort, bo persuaded to make it their regular annual business, to the 
advantage of all parties. Of course, the white men would not work 
with the negroes, nor would the planter ask them to do so. And 
as to such persons trying to persuade the negroes to run away, it 
is all a humbug; there is not one man in ten thousand, even of the 
so-called Abolitionists, that would advise a negro to run away it he 
could, even if laborers were taken from the free states ; for there 
is hardly one thing that our laborers dread more than the idea 
that the blacks may somehow get up North, and compete with 
them in wages ; or drive them out of the market by degrading 
their toil ; and there is hardly a free state, where we can get even 
a humane law passed, for the protection of such as do, and must 
sometimes come, for that very reason. Laborers are the last of all 
men that ever want to see a negro in the North ; and I believe all 
this cry and alarm in the South, is kept alive by a set of combined 
political knaves and fools, for mere selfish and political ends ; and 
as they have got the control of the press, they keep it a-going. 
The planters and masters would act wisely to take care of their own 
real interests, without heeding them. I do not deny that there are 
men in the North who think slaves ought to run away ; but they 
are very few, and mostly of the middle class, who never go South, 
or anywhere else, ten miles from home. 

II. Again. The North can do something in this great and 
glorious cause, beside merely to talk. If our Northern doughfaces 
are not at this hour, as fully, and far more meanly responsible for 
American slavery, than even the slaveholders themselves, I have 
never been able to see it. The plain fact is, we have all been 
silent or sleeping partners in the game, all the way through ; we 
have quietly pocketed the full benefits of the Union, and sold our- 
selves, body and soul, for its securities, offices, and emoluments. 
When we therefore, strut up to the South and say, "Stand by, for 
I am holier than thou," and demand of her alone to take all the 
temporary evils and risks of emancipation, she is justly disgusted 
and indignant. For she knows that if slavery be a crime, we are 
socially and politically particeps criminis, and ever have been. 
No, let the North at once manfully propose that, whenever any 
state, in its own sovereign capacity, or any individual under the 
laws of any state, shall desire to emancipate their slaves, they shall 
receive out of the public treasury of the Union, a just and proper 



65 

share of their real value per capita ; and the North, South, East 
and "West, all share alike in the temporary losses and inconveni- 
ence of emancipation, and in the final good and glory that would 
accrue to the Union and the world, I am aware that many in the 
North will here begin to stumble over their abstractions again; 
they cannot run so big, and broad, and just a doctrine, through 
their emancipation spinning jennies, simply because it is big, and 
broad, and just. But my reasons for this measure, are : First. — It 
is just ; due to the African race, for they have earned the whole na- 
tion far more money than it would cost. It is only "giving to the 
laborers who have reaped down our fields, their just hire." Second. 
—It would be a finality ; that long sought charm of both the 
North and the South ; and had it been done years ago, all our pre- 
sent loss, and tumult, and alarm, never could have occurred ; and 
we have actually lost more money, in clear cash, in the past six 
months, than it would have taken to have prosecuted such a scheme 
for the next ten years, under any ordinary necessities of such an 
administration, aside from all the other manifold perils by which 
we are now surrounded. Such a measure, seasonably and properly 
prepared, would calm all unnatural and angry discussions, and all 
fear for ourselves, for the Union, or for our posterity, because it is 
just. And God himself stills all moral tempests whenever justice 
is fairly done ; our full responsibility would then be met, and God 
would require no more, even if man did. 

The North can afford this. The North cannot afford to allow 
the South to incur all the first costs and hazards, of ridding this 
continent of slavery, and leave to her alone all the glory of such a 
final result; the posterity of the North ought also to have some 
just share in tins heritage of sunlight, this harvest of glory. 

The South can afford it. Such a plan interferes with no real or 
pretended state or vested rights of any sort. It approaches them 
in no offensive spirit ; it gives them full liberty, and full time, for 
the proper and necessary readjustment of all their civil and social 
institutions, according to their own ideas of duty, of justice, and of 
interest. It simply says to the man of the South, "Brother, we are 
in an evil case, all of us ; we have, doubtless, all of us, been more 
or less remiss and delinquent, as regards our whole duty. Let us 
both now do our duty, heartily, as unto God, and not unto man." 
Cannot the South afford this ; I think I know that she both could 
—10 



66 

have done it, and would have done it, if proposed at the proper 
time. 

•But would such a plan pay ? And first I answer that it will pay, 
in cash down. Such a measure, if instituted, could, of course, pro- 
gress only by slow degrees, and would make no sudden draughts 
upon either the money or the labor of the country. But its effects 
on social and political harmony and stability, on the rise of lands, 
the impetus given to Southern hope, Southern enterprise, North- 
ern capital, commerce and skill, would be so great, that it would 
continually pay to the country in cash, far more than it would cost. 
It is, in fact, the best speculation that the American people could 
possibly enter into ; for there is but one thing on earth or in Heaven 
that pays so much cash down in the long run, as justice ; and that 
one thing is, mercy ; and in this measure they both meet, and are, 
therefore sure to pay well. Since the above proposal Avas first 
made to the public, it is said that a company of speculators, seri- 
ously proposed to purchase all the slave estates in a neighboring 
state, with the design of emancipating all the slaves, on the ground 
of the profits that would ensue upon the rise of land in that state 
alone. It may be too late, or rather not the right time, just now, 
to propose such a plan, but it will never be finally too late to do 
justice, so long as it is possible to be done ; and I would not give 
two straws for all the emancipation gabble of that class of North- 
ern philanthropists, who are only willing to talk, and not willing to 
put their hands in their pockets, and their shoulder to the wheel, 
and manfully help lift the black man, and the white man too, out 
of their present unfortunate condition, let who will be to blame or 
not to blame for it. A philanthropy that simply gabbles its ab- 
stractions in the ears of its oppressed or unfortunate brethren, and 
will do nothing more, lest it should commit some technical impro- 
priety, is not worth the loss of the pure air that its eloquent speeches 
spoils. No ; let us show that we are ready to do something, as well 
as to talk, whenever and wherever the way can be opened to us, 
to take our full share, and even more than our share of the burdens 
and losses, if there are any te be borne. For myself, I never wish 
the planters to free their slaves and colonize them South, without 
giving me and all my friends our full share in all the first costs ; 
and, therefore, in all the final glory of the work. 



67 

But, again I ask will this pay ? 

"When, in future ages, the equatorial warmth of the sunny South 
has brooded into new life, adorned with new plumage, and inspired 
with new songs, all the arts and ornaments of earth, clothed all its 
dead and mummy forms with living flesh, and made all nature ra- 
diant with the beauties, and vocal with the melodies of her own 
tuneful groves; when she graces all arts with the polish of her 
rich metals and woods; adorns all races with the splendor of her 
diamonds, her jewels, and her gems; when she pours abroad, over 
all lands, the odor of her spices, and the ocean of her sweets ; when 
she completes the measure and the melody of their science, their 
eloquence, their music, and their songs, fires anew the ardor of 
their devotion, and gilds with a diviner radiance, the glory of their 
faith; and when joyously responding to these new incitements to 
enterprise, to justice and to peace, without painfnl'sweat from slave 
or man, the myriad mechanisms of the North, like coral insects in 
the sea, shall perform all human toil — nature alone the slave — 
man forever free ; when her engines of speed and of power, like the 
fiery wheels in the prophet's vision, shall course every land, and 
throng every sea ; when the sorcery of her science shall gleam and 
confiscate in every Northern sky, and ceasing from conquest, the 
bow of her peace shall span the ocean and the land; when these 
two great races shall thus stand on all their polar and equatorial 
height-, like the Hebrews on Gerazim and Ebal of old, to shout 
with their myriad tongues the final jubilee of earth; to bless him 
thai keeps, and curse him that breaks the law of his God; then it 
will pay; justice will pay; mercy will pay; God will pay; the 
glory of earth and the jubilee of Heaven will pay; then shall the 
mighty mystery of Africa be revealed, and the true glory of Ame- 
rica disclosed to the world. Reader! white man ! black man ! mas- 
ter and slave ! what part shall you and I play in this great drama 
of the eternities ( We have each and all alike, our own appropri- 
ate sphere to act in ; let us all remember then, that 

"Honor and shame from no conditions rise; 
Act well your part, there all the honor lies." 

''Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye 
have done it also unto me." 



CHAPTER VI 



It is often said that slavery, or the presence of the black man, 
has been a curse to this country, Nothing could be more unjust 
or untrue. Some parts of the eloquent and far-famed book of Mr. 
Helper, on u The Impending Crisis," have given a wide currency 
to this idea. The reasonings on which this charge is sustained are 
based mostly on the relative value of real estate, in the North and 
the South, per acre ; but a few words will suffice to demolish all 
such reasonings together. It is self-evident that the value of real 
estate, the world over, depends, in general, upon the density of 
population on it, or anticipated upon it or around it, and the value 
of the improvements put upon it by human labor — such as cities, 
factories, railroads, roads, wharves, bridges, fences, houses, farms, 
etc., etc. It is equally self-evident that a civilized and skillful 
laborer will put more of this value, in the same time, upon any 
given territory, than an uncivilized and unskillful one ; that is, 
civilized and skillful labor is by far the best, but that does not 
prove the other good for nothing, or an absolute curse to the land. 
The poor, ignorant man, black or white, if he cannot do as much 
as his superior, or do it as well, can still do something ; and God 
knows, and the world knows, that the poor black man has done 
much, and it is wrong to rob him of the full credit of what he has 
done ; is it not ? Shall we slander the poor ? 

We invaded the forests of North America with two distinct, 
great armies of laborers : one from Europe, civilized and skillful ; the 
other from Africa, uncivilized and unskillful. The one army now, 
with all its white officers and commanders, in the South, amounts 
to some ten millions, more or less ; while the great army of the 
North amounts to nearly twenty millions — thus having a double 
advantage over them in numbers, as well as in skill. Considering 



70 

the capital and education and means they brought with them, their 
natural efficient force is at least four (if not six) to one. Both 
armies began alike, ax in hand, on the Atlantic coast, and 
advanced, annihilating the forests as they went, toward the far 
"West. But again the weaker division took by far the widest 
breadth of territory, and, of course, advanced far less rapidly ; not 
only from want of skill and of numbers, but from breadth of work. 
Now, to suppose that each of these divisions should have put the 
same value per acre upon the territory they have, occupied, is sim- 
ply to suppose that one uncivilized and unskillful African can do 
as much work as a slave, and is, therefore, actually worth as much 
as some four or six civilized and skillful Europeans — which is 
much more than we desire to claim for the black man ; for it is 
more than any human being, black or white, bond or free, could 
possibly do. But we still contend that he has done something — 
yea, a great deal ; and that the whole country, instead of regarding 
him as a curse and a nuisance, are bound to regard him as a heroic 
co-laborer, to whom they owe a debt of gratitude they never can 
or will repay. Suppose, now, this Southern army of laborers had 
all stayed in Africa. No more would have come from Europe 
than have now come ; for we have taken all that would come, and 
had no means of forcing any more. Of course one of two things 
must have happened: either the whole South would have remained, 
to this day, a perfectly worthless wilderness, or the Northern army 
must have turned down and cultivated it, instead of advancing to 
the "West, as they have — and left an equally uncultivated wilder- 
ness out of the grounds now occupied in the "West ; for they have 
all had as much as they could do in the North and "West, and 
could not have gone South without neglecting just as much some- 
where else. 

So far, then, from the black man's having been a curse to the 
soil, and depreciated its value, and all that, he has really given all 
the value to it it now possesses, under the direction and co-opera- 
tion of his masters. They have hewn down its forests and built 
its cities, wharves, roads, bridges, fences, farms and houses, and 
thus actually given it all its real value ; which the white army 
could not have done, for their hands were full at the North and 
"West. In addition to this, the black man, by the culture of cotton, 
has vastly cheapened the clothing of the whole Northern army, 



71 

increased immeasurably their comforts, luxuries, manufactories, 
commerce, wealth and arts, and thus stimulated emigration and 
immensely swolen their numbers with all new sorts of artizans and 
enterprises. These, and similar facts, again show the complete 
social as well as civil obligation of the North to meet their full 
share of the temporary responsibilities and losses in the manumis- 
sion "i- removal of the -law, whenever and however it may occur; 
for tin- North has really been more benefited by the indirect labor 
than th<- South has by the direct labor of the slave — having none 
of the drawbacks oi hi- presence and influence among them. 

Call the black man a curse to the soil and to the county? How 
astonishing! Do people really think that God has gone crazy, or 
abdicated his throne? It' not. they themselves must surely be 
insane! Why. the whole country ought to consider that it owes 
the black men a debt it can never repay, except by doing justice, 
loving mercy and walking a little more humbly with its God. 
Look at the work ho has already done. These true heroes of labor 
have already conquered one great empire from the wilderness, 
while other empires and other conquests are still before them; and 
the world owes them, already, a greater debt of gratitude than to 
any army of the much lauded heioes of war, from Xerxes' day to 
our own. They have no burning cities and blood sodclened fields 
in their march to conquest and to empire. And they submit to no 
meaner or more degrading despotisms— to no more cruel suffering 
and hardships; and to a service infinitely less revolting, detestable 
and degrading. Yet, forsooth, the one is a slave, and a curse, and 
the other an angel and a her-: is he? "Oh, how this world is 
given to lying, Hal.*' — Falstaff. 

tion meek their useful toil, 
u- homely j<>ys and destiny obscure; 
Nor grandeur hear, with a disdainful sunk', 
These short ami ample annals "i' the poor." 

But is it Baid that all this should have been done without 
Blaverj thai is, without compulsory labor ? If the wild man of 
AtY'.ea, mi- even our own children, with centuries of hereditary 
civilization in their veins, can be inured to patient and continuous 
industry, without compulsion, it surely ought to be done, and some 
wise man B hould Bhow us at once how it can be done. But suppose 
the gentleman, fresh from the jungle, should choose to be excused, 
and thus terminate at once his own task, his own duty and disci- 



12 

pline, and all possible future high hope, both for himself and his 
race: what shall then be done? I admit that all this could and 
should have been achieved without cruelty, and without injustice 
of any sort, especially such as constitutes the chief staple of many 
of our infamous black laws ; but how it could be done without a 
degree of compulsion that must amount to slavery, in one proper 
sense of that term, I cannot conceive. The philosopher who could 
explain it would greatly benefit the world. That the black man, 
when kept too long on Northern soil, depreciates it, I am well 
aware ; but this is wholly the fault of the indolence and negligence 
of the white man, or of his greediness in retaining the negro after 
his own proper work is done, and the time for his exodus further 
South has come. It is not the black man's fault. But is it said 
that the curse consists in the deterioration of the white race itself, 
I admit the tendency and the fact. Mixing an inferior staple in the 
hopper, necessarily detracts from the perfection of the product, of 
course ; and while the white man has leveled the negro up, the 
neo-ro has also leveled the white man down. And so it has ever 
been. It was so in the old Roman invasions and incursions, on all 
sides. If there were some way that we could draw out of a barrel, 
with no tendency to empty it, it would be very handy ; but it so 
happens there is not ; and the race that imparts civilization by 
social contact must be content to be the loser, or to take barbarism 
in part pay, for it is all they can get from that source ; and if they 
hold up, they must derive a new inspiration from some other 
source. But although I glory in being Yankee born and Yankee 
bred, and an abolitionist at that, to the back bone — having voted 
the extreme anti-slavery ticket for twent} r years — I confess 1 have 
no sympathy with those terribly exquisite Anglo-Saxons who seem 
to grudge the little loss of moral power their own race must incur 
in conferring the great boon of civilization on other races and 
other lands ; though I admit and deplore both the danger and the 
fact. But one great cause of this deterioration of the master lies 
in the fact that we have never proposed, either to ourselves or to 
others, any rational solution of the great problem of slavery, either 
as to its laws of progress, its rational responsibilities and aims, or 
its final and hopeful result. "We have shut both races up together 
in flat despaik — to an utter hopelessness of anything for the 
negro, but interminable slavery where he now is. The one has 



73 

felt that he must and should not be freed, and the other that he 
could not be freed, on fl e soil, and neither could see any possible 
hope abroad; and after the last flickering ray of hope from African 
colonization tied away, the white man girded himself, sternly and 
relentlessly, to the task of crushing the slave down to that inexora- 
ble and eternal doom, for which alone it seemed God had created 
him. In a despair still more hopeless, the slave sullenly and reluc- 
tantly submitted, simply because he could not help it. But nature 
jtself iV.rced him, even in spite of himself, to keep his eye out upon 
every new election, and for every new hope, of either revolution 
or Insurrection; and master and servant were both alike degraded 
by this inevitable influence — the one by the rigor it incited and 
the suspicions il engendered, the other by the recklessness it 
inspired ; and it is hard to say which of the two most need, at this 
moment, the re-invigoration of some rational hope fur the final 
exodus of the slaves, by fair and honorable means, from the land. 
The millions of the North need it, too, to enable them to shape 
their policy and direct their power toward some truly practicable, 
honorable and humane end. But all these untoward evils are not 
the fault of the black man, nor is he therefore a curse to the land. 
All men are apt to attribute effects which they both feel and hate, 
to causes which lie outside of themselves: so the slaveholder quite 
naturally ascribes the present sullenness and uneasiness of the slave 
to Northern agitation and Northern abolition, instead of to that 
appalling despair which has at length settled over both master and 
slave, like a cloud of eternal night, engendering all sorts of rigors, 
phantasies and fear,, in the mind of the one, and all modes of dis- 
trust, tear and hate in the very bottom of the soul of the other. 
[nstead of that genial, and gradual, and indispensable amelioration 
which his increased capacity demands, he is met, of necessity, with 
a more forbidding and hopeless frown than ever before. Now, in 
the direct presence of a mighty and resistless, though silent and 
unobtrusive cause like this, operating continually upon every human 
sonl, white and black — shaping not only all their opinions and 
policies, but the most secret thoughts and feelings of their hearts — 
to attempt to ascribe the relative changes between master and 
slave to Northern agitation, or any other mere external cause, is as 
absurd as it would be to ascribe the daily revolutions of the solid 
globe to the flapping of wings and the crowing of the cocks, before 

—11 



the sun-rise of each day. Mere words of any sort can never be 
causes; tliey are in tlieir own nature, simply effects. Remove the 
cause, and the effect will die of itself. 

The South may build a Chinese wall up to the stars, all around 
their empire, excluding all ingress and all egress*, they may tar 
and feather, and hang, and burn all abolitionists inside, and forever 
silence all those outside; and it will not, in any considerable 
degree, touch, change, or arrest the inevitable march and the 
impending doom of this silent, omnipresent, invisible, but still 
resistless spiritual power, ever holding the white and the black 
man alike in its fatal and inexorable grasp — the grasp of a present 
despair and a final death. For neither human nature nor human 
society can live without hope. Give, then, to both the white man 
and the black man, a new hope, as the primary and indispensable 
condition of really benefiting either: hope, hope; help, fellows, 
help. These men are in the frenzy of despair: give them hope, 
give them hope, all history, reason and philosophy exclaim; the 
human soul itself shrieks out, give them hope — the only light that 
heaven itself can shed over the darkness of earth ; give them hope, 
says the thunder-peal of God's providence, bursting from the sun- 
lit clouds of their final tropical home, and from all the terrific 
storm-clouds that, in their rear, are driving them toward it. And 
to obey this summons, and strive to give a rational and soul- 
inspiring hope to all the friends of humanity, is one chief design 
of this unpretending little book. 

But it is often said that the North and the United States govern- 
ment has nothing to do with slavery, and that its sole duty is, like 
Pilate before the crucifixion, simply to wash its hands and proclaim 
its innocence. Well, that must be a very singular sort of a gov- 
ernment that really has nothing to do with the present or final weal 
or woe of four millions of black men and six millions of white 
men, occupying more than half of its natural territory. I am 
shrewdly inclined to suspect that God will teach them that they 
have something to do with it, in spite of all their parchment 
abstractions and declarations; and I wonder if this extremel}- 
original thought has ever occurred to any other mortal man ? 
Possibly the recent rumors of secession and civil war may have 
suggested it to some one or two beside myself. I will not claim it, 
therefore, as a wholly and exclusively original idea. Whenever 



75 

the United States government, as such, can cease to have something 
to do with slavery, common sense will cease to survive, and com- 
mon humanity cease to walk above ground. And whenever its 
agitation ceases in the halls of Congress, all slavery over the face 
of the whole earth will have ceased, or all freedom on this conti- 
nent will have been extinguished. There is not, and for genera- 
tions to come there cannot be, a government under heaven, that 
has not, yearly and hourly, to do with practical slavery, in some of 
its multiplied forms. For wisely and humanely to guide, protect, 
counsel, encourage, and lead onward and upward, to a capacity for 
a wider freedom, the toiling and multiform millions now inevitably 
under some form of masterdom and bondage, is the great end of 
all possible human governments; and the State, the Government, 
I lie Czar, the Emperor, the Monarch, or the Republic, that attempts 
to ignore this high duty, is not simply a traitor, in the worst sense 
of that term, but an absolute, unmitigated fool. You do not often 
catch single monarchs in such a folly; they have too much self- 
respect. What, then, can the United States government do with 
slavery? I; can possibly do but two single things : it can act firmly 
and wisely in its own sphere; or it can act foolishly and weakly, 
either in or out of it ; and in both cases alike, it will still have very 
much to do with slavery. In every important sense of the terms, 
the government is. in its own nature, the servant, the mere creature 
of the white man; and, in the nature of things, also the natural 
and inevitable guardian of the final destiny of the black man — not 
as responsible for his present weakness, or his consequent present 
lot, but for the possibility of his present hope and his future ascent; 
and while it has no legal right, and no legal jurisdiction over either 
his emancipation or his person, it can, and inevitably will, shape 
and control his history and his final destiny. And this is the most 
and the best that any mortal power could possibly do for him, out- 
side of his own personal master and friends. 

As regards the proper policy of the government, two other 
things are self-evident : 

I. A true and successful state policy must coincide and co-ope- 
rate with the manifested will of God — the true "higher law." 
And the State, instead of flouting at a higher law, must simply be 
content to execute it, either intelligently and knowingly, or stupidly 
and blindly, until they get strong enough to dethrone Almighty 



76 

God ; then they can do as they please. Till then, they will, in 
substance, either wisely or stupidly — either by wrong doing, with 
its attendant evils, or by right doing, with its attendant good— only 
execute, in the end, his higher will — his sovereign, resistless, inex- 
orable " higher law " — just as they always, in fact, have been 
doing, only they have often done it reluctantly, stupidly, wickedly, 
indirectly, and in spite of themselves ; whereas they should have 
done it intelligently, directly, promptly and cheerfully. But, for- 
tunately, the final success of his plan depends not at all on either 
their wisdom or folly ; though their own transient well-being and 
comfort, and that of their fellow-men, does depend upon it. 

II. The second self-evident point is, that such a just and intelli- 
gent state policy — such a wise and intelligent execution of this 
higher law of God — will not at all points suit the local and transient 
interests and prejudices, conventionalisms, axioms, customs or laws 
of any party, sect, state or locality whatever, and, from their stand- 
point, will appear at some points more or less wrong, inexpedient 
and contrary — at least to all their notions of justice and humanity. 
For God's policies are not and cannot be made to suit either locali- 
ties, or narrow parties, or sects, or states, but the great eternal 
whole of a broad and comprehensive humanity, whose final issues 
are not with the day, but with the round of eternal years. Such a 
policy, therefore, cannot wholly suit the narrow interests, and pas- 
sions, and prejudices of the North or the South, the abolitionist or 
the fire-eater, the Border or the Gulf States, the master or the 
slave. All these will, at points, in. turn approve, and in turn resist 
it. But in resisting, tliey will, in the end, though indirectly and 
foolishly, only aid in its final execution ; and such has been the fact 
through the whole history of this government. And no man or men 
— nay, not even an angel from heaven — could execute to the letter 
this truly just and humane policy, without encountering more or 
less of this resistance, on all hands, and from all quarters— some- 
times more from one, sometimes from another quarter. For God 
has no pet races, or pet men, or pet sects, or pet states, or pet par- 
ties, upon the earth ; only some that he has got along in the great 
Lancasterian school of the eternities, a little further than others. 
As Paul so truthfully says, " he is no respecter of persons " — much 
less of conventionalities and parties, conditions and sects. And 
yet, to hear some men talk, one would suppose that the Deity was 



blindfolded with mere parchments and abstractions, and compelled 
to feel his way, in the government of the universe, under that, 
obvious embarrassment, much like the fabled Cyclops in search of 
Ulysg 

But if it be the will of God that the slaves and black men should 
go South, and not North, then the whole policy of this government 
should tend to that end ; and such, as a matter of fact, it ever has 
been, in spite of all opposition, all prejudices, all interests and all 
legislation combined; and so it will ever be, simply because God 
is both wiser and stronger than men of all parties and all states put 
ther. Now, what are our Fugitive Slave laws, our Missouri 
( ' unpromises, and repeals, our exclusion of all slaves from North- 
ern Stales and Territories, our Northern emigration societies, our 
Kansas raids, our Southern conquests, wars, filibusterings and pur- 
chases, and even our tolerated slave trade overall the* soil, but one 
vast and consistent scheme of policy, directed with certain and 
inexorable aim, and often by selfish, unjust and cruel means, to the 
one great final end of concentrating the entire black race in the 
extreme South? Good men and bad ones have voted against 
every oneof these measures ; the strongest States and the strongest 
statesmen haveopposed them; but the great statesman over all 
was for them. The rest were mere puppets in his hand, still doing 
his will, still executing the very "higher law" against which they 
sometimes resisted, and sometimes railed and flouted; and he will 
be very likely to rule this nation, and to really direct this interest, 
for some time to come ; for He has a party that none are likely 
either to out-general or defeat. Now, there never has been a single 
party or interest, North or South, black or white, that has not been 
crossed, baffled and and disappointed with this policy, at one point 
or another, and that has not most vehemently opposed it at each of 
these points of local, or partisan, or selfish interest; but the policy 
still moves on, in spite of democratic numbers at the North, or 
aristocratic pride and prestige at the South; and, worse yet, in 
spite of all the both seeming and real interests of the individual 
black man and white man alike. Now, this general policy is of 
God; it is his great higher law, and should be the policy of the 
State, and the Church, too. But its incidental cruelties, and acts 
of outrage and injustice, are all of man — the mere depraved 
human incidents, which ought, if possible, to be all swept away ; 



78 

but so long as human beings are only human, they cannot be. It 
is self-evident, then, in the third place, that it is the part of a great 
and wise statesman not to attempt the impossibility of overthrow- 
ing this general policy, but simply, with all available humanity and 
justice, to strive to moderate, and limit, and assuage the attendant 
evils of its execution — settling it in his heart, that- if he so does, he 
must at some points offend all parties and all interests alike— until 
a party can be raised up, with a breadth of philosophy and human- 
ity, and a power of comprehension, adequate to embrace the com- 
plex issues of the whole case — which perhaps is not likely soon to 
be ; for parties cling to their precedents and records as vehemently 
as club-footed men do to their stilts. But the true future record of 
this whole policy lies in heaven, not on earth — in the mind and 
thought of the eternal God, not in Democratic or Republican plat- 
forms and manifestoes. We shall always have, therefore, a Fugi- 
tive Slave law, a territorial exclusion law, and an international 
slave trade of some sort, good or bad, just or unjust, in their mode 
and form, because they are essential to the great end, though the 
master's temporary and personal interests are opposed to the one, 
and the slave's to the other; and as an abolitionist — as the true 
friend of the black man, and without the least regard to the interest 
of the master — I should be, and am, in favor ot this policy. For 
it is in the highest degree impolitic, and in the end inhuman, to 
suffer the black race to scatter all over the North, away from their 
fellows, and away from all possibility of the final freedom and 
elevation of their race. They are weak enough, in all conscience, 
if kept together and united; and all proper care should be taken 
to keep them from scattering their numbers, and frittering away 
their strength in the Quixotic pursuit of a freedom that must still, 
in the North, forever elude their grasp. There is not one-half the 
real sympathy between the white people, as a whole, and the 
blacks, to-day, in the North, that there is in the South. In spite 
of the superior freedom and justice of their laws, the antipathy of 
race increases everywhere as we go North. It is far stronger in 
New Orleans than in Brazil — in Boston than in New Orleans — and 
so intense in Canada, that nothing but the strong arm of monarch- 
ial law could keep the blacks there from the violence of the mob 
for a single year ; and to attempt to make a black community really 
free and happy in any Northern climate, is just as absurd as to 



TO 

attempt to grow oranges in Greenland. Why, then, encourage 
them, in their weakness and ignorance, to wander from their com- 
rades to these hopeless climes, and scatter their forces over frozen 
zones, where they are sundered forever from all true sympathy 
and all real service to their race, as such? Is it asked what an 
intelligent slave can do in the South for his fellows? I answer, 
much, every way ; and he is doing much. True, he cannot at 
once overturn the laws, however cruel and unjust; nor can he 
emancipate either himself or his fellows ; nor dissolve the Union, 
nor shake down the solar system, not a whit more than his master 
can. Perhaps he has intelligence enough not even to threaten it. 
But there is a vast deal which every good and intelligent slave can 
d", and i,- doing, for his fellows, aside from all this; and he cannot 
live there without doing it. For God places no man on earth 
where he cannot do good to his fellows, if he chooses — not even in 
the solitude of a dungeon. Even Moses could do his people no 
good while in the court of Pharaoh, nor while wandering' in Ara- 
bia, but only when he came and took aphis lot with theirs, "choos- 
ing rather to sutler affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy 
the pleasures of sin foi a moment." Yet this Moses had a first 
iate chance to run away, and say, "now I will take care of myself, 
and lei my race and kindred go; tor I can see no hope for them." 
And, though I have no idea that the slaves will ever be delivered 
by miracle, or by servile or civil war, still there are other ways in 
which every good black man is, in fact, of the highest possible use 
to his fellows, and to his race, although oppressed and enslaved — 
far more so than he can be, away off in Canada or elsewhere. 
They need his advice, his guidance, his sympathy, and instruction, 
and counsel, and example, and intercession, in all their heavy, 
manifold temptations and trials. Make this case your own : If you 
and your race were in slavery, would you wish to have all your 
best, and boldest, and bravest, and shrewdest men run away, and 
leave you to your solitude and your fate, alone? There is one 
possible case in which you might, perhaps, wisely desire it: and 
that is, if you could see no possible point or future hope, either for 
yourself or any of your race. But that is not the case with the 
black man. The presence of all such men tends, by an inevitable 
law, to elevate the whole race, to "undo their heavy burdens," and 
to fit them, and to secure to them, a broader liberty in a higher 



so 

sphere; and it is the true policy of the government to throw all 
possible just and humane obstacles in the way of such dispersions, 
and such abandonments, even though it may seem against mere 
individual interests. The government, as the general guardian of 
the future interests of the race, has a wise and humane right to 
insist that " every black man shall do his duty to his fellows," irre- 
spective of all claims of the master, and not, for slight reasons, or 
by illusive hopes, be enticed to abandon them ; and, either from a 
right or a wrong motive, thank God, they are sure to do it, because 
he will have it done. I knew there are here, as everywhere, hard 
and extreme cases, which should be, and therefore will be, made 
exceptions to all general rules. And. whether the government is to 
treat free men like felons and wild beasts, because they simply do 
their duty— their most solemn Christian duty, as they conceive— in 
these hard cases, is quite another question. True, the will of the 
devil may, and must at last, execute the will of God ; but it would 
be far better done as angels do it. 

Perhaps it may be said that no more slaves would, in any case, 
run away than fairly come under the rule of hard cases ; or, at 
least, no more than is necessary to render slave property insecure 
on the border States, and thus hasten the migration of the whole 
of them to the South. But were there no law against it, I fear 
there would. They would be enticed away, in a multitude of 
cases, by narrow-minded and evil-minded persons, in which it was 
their most solemn duty to themselves, to their masters and to their 
race still to remain — for many masters treat their slaves so well, 
that they have no moral right to leave them, and no possible hope 
of bettering their condition by doing it : aside from all their duty 
to their race, and the inevitable dangers to both races from such a 
course. 

But in another aspect of the case the best interest of the black 
man requires that his race should be spread widely over all our 
States and Territories, and thus be allowed to work upon our farms 
in all modes of culture, to enter all our ships, manufactories, cities, 
wharves, navy yards and dock yards, and especially our capitals 
and shire-towns, and all places where freedom is discussed and 
justice administered and defended ; for this is his school, and must 
constitute the greater part if not the whole of his education, till he 
rises in the scale of being to a better capacity for the use of books 



81 

and other means ; and it is the very best school in the whole 
world that his Heavenly Father could have put him into. No 
other country and no other place, for him, could compare with it. 
But in the North he can learn but little, that will be of use to him 
in his final home, that he does not find in the South ; and, in spite 
of some little loss, perhaps, in this respect, the true policy of con- 
centrating his race toward the South should be persisted in. But, 
on his proper territorial limits he should be allowed the widest 
range and the utmost freedom the government can secure to him ; 
and above all things he ought never to be excluded from the 
national capital, or from any of the national navy yards or other 
domains in tin; free States. Exclude the black man from the 
District of Columbia, the great seat and center of all those ideas 
and policies that must forever shape the destinies of his race — the 
only place in the Onion where the great principles of national and 
international law are continually discussed, by all classes of society, 
from the top to the bottom! How preposterous ! ! Why not 
exclude the white man \ "But the black man can go there only as 
a Blave." True; but infinitely better as a slave than not at all, 
for without free access, or at Least some access, to the capital, the 
education of the slave could not be complete, in this country. 
"But he is neither allowed to hear or to see; he is a slave ; at 
home to work for his master." True, again ; but he has got eyes 
and ears, and bears and knows, and every day thinks about the 
practical substance of the "high debate," oftentimes, in realty, 
mor,. tnilv and more profoundly, though less learnedly, than does 
the gabbling, brainless Senator, or the stupid and doughfaced 
President and Judge. For Grod has put him in a position to see 
things somewhat as they really are, and the mere farce of conven. 
tionalisms, consistencies ami customs does not entirely hoodwink 
him. it is the best school the black man — slave or free — has in 
the country : the very highest department in his great manual labor 
university; and why exclude him from it! There would be not 
one slave the less. The only thing would be that some hundreds 
or thousands of poor black people would be taken from a place of 
comparative ease, and of immense moral and civil advantage to 
their race, and sent to the Southern cotton and rice fields, where 
they can learn nothing, see nothing and hear nothing but the dull 
routine of their daily labor. Is it said that they learn nothing here ? 
—V2 



82 

It is slanderous, and stupid, and false ! They do learn ! Let any 
man reflect on the daily influence of such society, and he can see 
that no human being can fully escape it, no more than he can the 
presence of the vital air. It is true, he may be shut up in the 
house, where he neither sees nor feels the whirl and roar of the 
great north- westers, but it still creeps in through every crack and 
crevice, and occasionally some careless master or some black friend 
leaves the door open, and the whole gale sweeps in. Has the 
reader ever thought how large a number of our most intelligent 
free blacks have come from regions within the moral and political 
influence of the capitol ? and such is the mysterious law of this 
hereditary civilization, that no man can tell how its impressions 
are made, or carried abroad, or transmitted. It is supposed, for 
instance, by many, that Napoleon Bonaparte received his first 
impressions, as a warrior and a statesman, before he was born, 
while his mother was fleeing, in terror, from an invading foe. 
Many similar facts admonish us not to exclude the slave from any 
possible position of observation or experience which it is consistent 
with his final good for him to occupy, whether at the capitol or in 
our navy yards and forts — whether under State or national control. 
" Oh, but we must relieve the national government of all respon- 
sibility for slavery!" Indeed; we must, then? Here is Pilate 
washing his hands ao-ain ! The real amount of all of this is, that 
we Anglo-Saxons, with whom all wisdom and freedom must neces- 
sarily die from off the face of the earth, and for whom, therefore, 
all other races should simply toil — we, the great, mighty, magna 
c/iarta, habeas corpus, constitutional, grand jury, grandiloquent 
people — must take care of our own abstractions, and consistencies, 
and humbugs, and let black men, and eternal justice, and truth, 
and realities take care of themselves. Well, now, we need not 
discuss this matter further ; for, by fair means or foul, God will 
keep the black man around our national and State capitols, our 
court houses, and hotels, and bar-rooms : our arsenals, navy yards, 
fortresses and dock-yards, and all such peculiarly public places, 
because He knows he needs to be there. He will not, at present, 
stick them all away off on the solitude of the plantation and the 
farm, for that is not the best place for all of them. True, some 
will be sold South, even from Washington — even under the stars 
and stripes. I weep for the lot of the individual : but his mission 



83 

South, with all his (to them) new and exciting ideas, will tend still 
to elevate the race; and if God should ever permit the Northern 
slave States to commit the atrocity. of selling all their free negroes 
down South — which he may, in due time, yet do — it would 
advance the race toward their ultimate freedom more than any 
other measure that could be instituted, and would be permitted, if at 
all, for that very reason alone. I have the highest respect for the 
motives and for the humanity of those who seek thus to sunder 
this government from all connexion with slavery; but I cannot 
accept either their policy or their reasons for it. The African 
slave trade will not be opened at present; not because it is any 
worse than the home trade, and in some respects not as bad, but 
simply because we have got as many blacks here as we can well 
manage, and its influence would in no way tend to the elevation, 
but to the depression of those who are here. 

We thus Bee how wonderfully the Heavenly Father of the black 
man has really taken care of him, through all changes and all 
vicissitudes, in spite of all hatred of race, all seeming evil and' all 
hostile legislation, as though he had been the sole and exclusive 
object of 1 1 i s care. And while the government, for years past, has 
attempted to ignore both the rights and the very existence of the 
black man, and has meanly apologised if it even seemed to regard 
them, it has in reality, done better for him than such creatures 
could have done, from any capacity in themselves, if they had 
made his interests alone their exclusive study and care; and thus, 
while even scoffing at the higher law, it has still executed the will 
of God, as a yoked hog runs into his sty: tail foremost. I would 
only beg leave to suggest to them that there is a more dignified 
way of doing the same thing. The idea that four millions of people 
can exist, anywhere on the lace of the earth, and quietly and 
industriously pursue their labors of industry and peace, without 
having their final and most substantial interests en d fo& for, in fact, 
implies, as we have said, that God has abdicated his throne, and 
that the Devil is ruling in his place: a very popular theology, 
which 1 cannot accept. But, however justly we may condemn and 
despise the pride, arrogance, insolence, selfishness, meanness and 
stupidity of the agents, and their motives, we cannot but admire 
the consistency, grandeur, harmony, wisdom and beneficence of 
the great final result — the policy and care of Heaven over the 



84 

black race. And, after all, there is no conflict between the real 
interests of the races, and no government can legislate for the real 
good of the one, without promoting the good of the other. I defy 
them to do it. 

It is scarcely necessary here to advert to those truly wise and 
brave and noble statesmen who have, even in the darkest times, 
and amid the greatest obloquies and perils, public and personal, 
manfully struggled to save the government and the country from 
the imbecility and infamy into which it has been plunged. The 
civilized world knows their history and their heroism so well, that 
it is hardly necessary to speak of them as not included in any just 
censures of a government which they could neither enlighten nor 
control. Nor is it needful to say that the chief functionaries of the 
government itself have been but too often the mere tools in the 
hands of a few desperate and apostate political traitors and dema- 
gogues, who have simply used them for their own ends more from 
their imbecility than from their innate depravity. 

Our whole difficulty, I repeat, evidently lies in the simple fact, 
that we have, on the same soil, two extreme races, under two extreme 
civilizations, and therefore requiring two extremes in civil institu- 
tions, or in the mode and form of administering justice between man 
and man. It is not in the power of man to adjust either one of these 
extremes to the other, so' that the same laws and forms shall suit 
both races. If it is in the power of God, Himself, it is certain He 
has never done it on earth, and, therefore, never showed us the 
way to do it. Hence we must perpetually keep up in form a 
double administration : one to suit the actual wants and destinies 
of the white race, and another to suit those of the black race. But 
this should be a harmless and, indeed, beautiful variety within a 
real harmony, without antagonism or injustice to any one : a mere 
variety in unity; and so, wisely administered, it would be. 

As regarrj-s^'the policy either of admitting, or of not admitting 
any more slave States, the matter is somewhat more doubtful ; at 
all events, we must not shut either master or slave up to despair, 
in the limits of our present Southern States, for that is the worst 
policy for both, and can result in nothing but St. Domingo twice 
told ; and, indeed, it ought not to ; for if men will play the fool, 
they ought to take the consequence of their folly. But whether 
the iinal exodus of the slaves to the South is to be overland, round 



85 

Central America, through a succession of slave or free States, so- 
called, or through some mixture of Loth, or whether he will go 
quietly across the seas, are questions still too far in the future to 
demand a present solution. "Sufficient unto the clay is the evil 
thereof." As an Abolitionist and friend of the black man, I am 
unwilling - at present, to pledge myself either for or against "any 
more slave States.*' I do not know what course it may be best to 
pursue, when Mexico and Central America come into the Union, 
as they are sure to do if the Union exists, (and if it goes to pieces, 
it will come together again and take them in, in due time, though 
Blavery may then be gone, and probably will be,) but I think it 
probable that more slave States in some form, on the South will be 
found a political necessity, equally for the good of the black and 
the white man ; and it is nut wise to commit ourselves to distinctive 
political measures so tar in the future ; although it is wise, like sen- 
sible men, to look around and ahead upon the on-rushing destinie^ 
that await us, and endeavor to forecast the general nature of the 
ultimate and present policy, which these may force on us all, wil- 
ling or unwilling. "Without doing this we may indeed be partisans, 
and politicians, and "public functionaries," and demagogues, an 
all that ; hut we cannot he statesmen, fit either to rule, nor yet even 
to vote. That it might not he besl to add slave States from even 
our preseni territory, is not perfectly clear. The wider the slave 
arc spread over new and fresh lands, the better it will he for the 
comfort of the present generation ; for slaves always fare bestunde 
such conditions-, the whole objection, then, to spreading them 
arises from its effect upon the future good of their race ; and tha 
Southern additions to our slave territory would, in any respect, 
harm the black race, is not clear. The political objection of in- 
creasing the relative power of the slaveholders of the extreme 
South, is the main objection, and a very great one, unless they 
come to behave themselves a little more decently than they have 
done of late. But if the North stands its ground now, and admin- 
isters the government without fear and without favor, the South 
can never again gain a political ascendency in the Union, however 
much territory is left open to slavery, for she has nothing to fill it 
with; and she will come out of the present contest bankrupt, in 
prestige, in character, and in means. And although I voted for 
Mr. Lincoln, as thousands of others did, because I believed that he 



S6 

would, on the whole, administer the government in accordance 
with my general principles, and more justly and impartially to all 
classes and races, North and South, than any other man ; still I 
did it with the reserved right of not assenting in full, and in ad- 
vance, to the popular doctrine of "no more slave States." And 
even if Mr. Lincoln himself, finds it necessary for the best good of 
all, to admit still more slave States on the extreme South, I should 
not be at all disappointed ; though if so, I hope their form and policy 
may be so changed as to comport with the age and land in 
which we live, a litttle better than some of our slave States now do ; 
at least, I hope they will not fall under the same persons. 

Much has been said about the black man's receiving no wages, 
and this is urged as an objection to all forms of slave States. But 
among all the white men whom I have hired, of a much higher 
grade of civilization and skill than the negroes usually are, I know 
of but very few whom I would be willing to take through life, and 
be bound to furnish them and their families simply what, in my 
own judgment, they might need from day to day. It would be 
much better for me, as now, to pay them common wages and let 
them provide for themselves, than to run any such risk ; and it is but 
a poor provision that most of them can make for themselves, even 
with the most industrious toil, if they have no other resource than 
their daily wages. And most black men would do far worse, be- 
cause they are not yet, in general, as far advanced as these whites 
are, and will not be for some generations yet to come. As soon as 
they are as far advanced, it will be better for the master to pay 
them wages than it will to provide for them as now. But it is 
neither fair nor honest to say, that because the slave has no daily 
or weekly sums in money, that, therefore, he has no wages ; many 
of them receive all, and actually more than they really earn, and 
far more than they could possibly earn for themselves, apart from 
their masters skill and care, superintendence and capital. Others 
(and how many I cannot say) are worked, starved, whipped, and 
jammed about in a way that it is shocking to contemplate, and a 
disgrace to even a barbarian State to allow ; others, are, themselves, 
worthless, and unprincipled, and ugly, and get nothing, simply be- 
cause they deserve nothing ; others are intelligent, polite and 
obliging to their masters, and all others ; far enough advanced in 
their own civilization as individuals, to be capable, not only of free- 



dom, but of high responsibilities ; and if it were not for the need of 
their social influence and example in helping to lift up their fellows 
beneath them, justice would demand that they should be set imme- 
diately free ; and in former times it was so, and will be so again, 
when the present nightmare of the South has passed away, and a 
better hope, and a consequent better temper, takes its place. I 
volunteer these remarks mainly to show some of my Abolition 
brethren in the North, the extreme injustice, if not wickedness, of 
judging men, whether black or white, master or slave, by their 
in. -re general name or class ; for we shall ever find the best of men 
as well us the vilest, in nearly all classes. And although absolute 
necessity compels us to deal with men politically, only in classes, 
it is totally unjust, as a mode of private and social, and especially 
of christian judgment and action. But suppose this whole system 
«.!' service lor house rent, food and clothes, f.r themselves and their 
families, was changed, and a system of weekly wages substituted 
by the master in Its place. That there would be some advantages 
I freely admit ; but that they would be practically as great as many 
suppose, 1 deny ; tor ma ny of the most advanced negroes it would, 
doubtless, be better; hut tor the others, I fear it might be even 
worse. At any rate, the negro, whether he received his wages in 
the form of money, or in the form of food, shelter and clothes, 
must stiil be, while he is at work, under the absolute control and 
direction of the master; with a liability, in sickness, in scarcity of 
crop.-, or of work. «.r from his own but too easy negligence of the 
future, to come to absolute want; and so long as the State held 
him under the same practical outlawry and anarchy, under the 
same doleful despair of all hopeful future, as now, such a chaise, 
in my opinion, on the part of the master, could, in no crse, do but 
little good, and in many cases would do evil. For the plain reason 
that the mere hope of a pittance of weekly wages, in any form, is a 
thing quite too small to inspire and sustain, much less to elevate 
any human soul. Here, again, our higher hope is indispensable; 
a hope of progress, of country, and of race, somewhere, either in 
the present or the dim future, is indespensable ; and it is a mistake 
to suppose that any race are to low to be either elevated and in- 
spired by its presence, or too high to be crushed by its absence, 
P >r God has never made any such races. But some few of my aboli- 
tion friends think that no slaveholder can be a good man, or deserve 



88 

any rights at all, from any source. "How," say they, "can a man, 
who, by his example, sanctions the atrocious code of slave laws, be 
a good man ?" Suppose now the United States should enact and 
ordain that it should be perfectly lawful for any man engaged in 
commerce on the high seas to rob, kill, and murder, to any extent, 
with impunity, and declare it meritorious so to do. What should 
be done % Should all commerce on earth at once cease ? Suppose 
a man, favorably situated for commerce, should say to himself, "I 
care nothing for this cruel and outrageous law ; I shall engage in 
commerce as though it had never existed ; I shall rob no man, and 
wrong no man, although this law gives me leave so to do." Does 
this man now sanction the law f In my opinion, the common sense 
of the human race would decide that he was giving the most ex- 
plicit testimony against the law, that any man possibly could ; for 
while he is under the greatest possible temptation to avail himself 
of the selfish advantages of the law, he refuses to do so, and thereby 
gives the highest possible testimony of moral principle against it ; 
and precisely so of every slaveholder who treats his slave justly and 
humanely in spite of the law ; instead of sustaining the cruel sys- 
tem, as embodied in the law, no man on earth can do more to un- 
dermine and destroy it. Is it said that the cases are not parallel 
because commerce is a lawful business. If we consult the records 
of the race, and the will of God, we shall find masterdom, absolute 
power of man over man, a more lawful business, and more early, 
and more widely introduced, than any form of commerce ; and in- 
troduced, also, as we have seen, for higher and nobler ends — the 
civilization of all races. Our practical difficulty is, I repeat, that 
we have brought two extreme races together, one of which, by its 
own nature and habit, is manageable only by masterdom ; the 
other has passed so far beyond it, that it can have no possible sym- 
pathy with it ; nay, can scarce tolerate its existence. And this 
fact is giving this nation a higher schooling and discipline, a deeper 
insight into the essentials of all freedom and justice, and a broader 
comprehension of the true end of all laws and policies, than any 
nation ever could have had before. And it is time for us to break 
through all our conventional shells, and look out upon the great 
facts and inherent principles of the case, as they really are. Is it 
said that all laws and institutions requiring compulsory labor are a 
barbarism, and tolerated only by barbarian society ? I admit that 



89 

all laws adapted to a barbarian race, must, in their own nature, in 
one sense, be barbarian laws; just as the laws for the soldier must 
be military, and not civil law ; the laws for the insane, insane laws, 
if you please, in the same sense ; but it does not follow that either 
should be unjust, or administered insanely or barbarously, or by an 
insane or barbarous man ; nor does it follow that the society which 
enacts and tolerates such forms of law, are either uncivil, or insane, 
or barbarian. But only, simply that they have soldiers, or insane, 
or semi-civilized men to deal with ; a law most fit for these may 
be perfectly absolute, strict, and rigorous, and totally unfit for all 
ordinary civilized life, and, therefore, neither a civil nor a civilized 
law; while still most wise, just and humane, both in its design and 
its administration. Of course, I do not pretend that our present 
infamous slave codes are such. But if made just what they ought 
to be, they would still be, in one sense, only barbarian laws, just 
so far as adapted to barbarian men. And, on this subject, we 
should take care not to blind our minds, nor inflame our passions, 
by the use of mere words. 



—13 



CHAPTER VII 



The present secession emeute lias sprung mainly from these 
causes. Our lathers wisely and humanely tolerated the absolute 
form of rule in the shop and the field, for the uncivilized race, 
alongside of the democratic form for the more advanced race — 
trusting to the humanity and patriotism of the master to make it 
no more severe, and of no longer continuance, than the absolute 
exigency of the case required. The direct contrast of the two 
forms of administration inevitably provoked discussion and remark, 
both from the free whites and from the emancipated blacks. The 
freedom of the North aroused the violence and the antagonism of 
the South, which finally eventuated in two opposite fanaticisms — 
the one of the extreme North, and the other of the extreme South 
— both hostile to the just and humane Union of the lathers, and 
still more hostile to each other. In this contest the North was 
perhaps the firsl offender in words, but the South in acts. The 
three prime offenders at the North, as all the world knows, were 
William Lloyd Garrison, the elder Lovejoy, and John Brown. 
The first offense of each of these men was simply and solely that 
they maintained that freedom of speech which, the world over, has 
been deemed the indispensable prerequisite of free institutions, in 
any shape whatever. For this, Garrison was imprisoned, and 
driven from the South, and even mobbed, threatened and insulted 
in the North ; Lovejoy was first expelled from St. Louis, and finally 
shot in Alton ; John Brown had his property and rights outraged 
in Kansas, and his children murdered before his eyes in its defense, 
under the pretended authority of that very Constitution that was 
pledged to give, both to freedom and to slavery, only substantial 
justice; and, falling into a natural and almost inevitable hatred of 
all tolerance of even a necessary absolute rule, he sought redress 
and revenge in his own way, and finally perished on the scaffold. 



92 

Senator Sumner spoke only as a free man — whether truly or not, 
so lawfully, and so circumspectly, that his opponents, in full power 
around him, could not call him even to order. He was afterward 
smitten down, while sitting, unarmed and defenseless, in his own 
seat in the Senate Chamber of the United States. The acts of 
outrage of the Southern fanatics, in their manifold riots, and lynch 
laws, and outrages — in seceding from the Union, seizing upon the 
United States forts, arsenals, mints, ships, and property of all sorts, 
firing upon the United States flag, and throwing all manner of 
insults and indignities upon the citizens of the North and the 
Union of the fathers — are too well known to need a rehearsal. 

It thus appears that the Southern fanaticism has been, in every 
instance, the eikst aggkessok in ACT ; and whether any less the 
aggressor in wokd than their compeers at the North, the daily 
records of Congress, and of the speeches there, as well as the whole 
newspaper and other literature of the South, shows, and shows 
beyond all question, to any tolerably sane man. It may be said 
that the South had a "peculiar institution," and were therefore 
placed in peculiar circumstances. And so had also the North ; for 
slavery is no more the " peculiar institution " of the South, than 
freedom and free speech are of the North ; and if the South or the 
North have not sense enough to defend their own peculiar institu- 
tions, without resort to tyranny and brutal violence, it is their own 
fault, and their shame, too, and not the fault of their neighbors. 
It will be seen from the foregoing pages how easy it is to defend 
both forms of institutions, so far as they are either needful, or pro 
fitable, or defensible ; and how entirely consistent they are for cer- 
tain ends — those very ends which the Constitution of our fathers 
proposes — and how utterly inconsistent they are on all other 
grounds, and for all other possible ends, except those which God 
has ordained, and which the whole spirit, as well as the letter, of 
our almost inspired Constitution of the Union allows. Within the 
bounds of that Constitution, nothing but real justice, in the highest 
and most enlarged sense, can be done to either race ; step outside 
of it, and God, and nature, and all history, and civilized man, are 
equally opposed to the terrible anarchy you at once inaugurate over 
the white race, and the still more terrible tyranny and despair you 
bring, like one vast deluge of endless night, over all possible hope 
of the black man. Fanatical seceders on both sides will lind at 



93 

last that they are not warring against mere paper conventionalisms, 
Lut against the deepest principles of God's eternal laws, and the 
deepest elements of human nature itself. South Carolina is, at this 
moment, at war with Almighty God, and with the whole human 
race, as really as with the Union of the States ; and the whole 
utterance of the monarchial press in England and in France shows 
that they feel this outrage upon the rights of human nature as 
keenly as we do, and are no more disposed to tolerate it. Still, the 
grave Senator.-, and even the divines, of that great State, most 
innocently inform us "that the citizens of South Carolina have by 
no means lost any portion of their patriotism, but only transferred 
Ll from the Union to the State." Indeed ! The patriotism of South 
Carolinians, then, it seems, is really a transferable commodity, as 
the world has always had good reason to suspect, And what would 
the Sta!^ do. if at the next move they should take a notion to 
transfer it to a pet monkey, or a favorite dog { But the .simple fact 
is, that the Constitution is based on the simple and indispensable 
idea of tolerating slavery, in State- where it must of necessity 
remain, so long only as that necessity may continue, and even of 
sustaining it there, so far as violence is appealed to by the black 
man ; tor all such appeals could only result in his deeper degrada- 
tion, or his utter destruction — and of propagating only freedom 
in all other States and Territories which are in any sense prepared 
to receive it. John Brown, and a very lev others on the extreme 
of the Northern fanaticism, apostatized and rebelled against the 
needful tolerance of the law; and he was executed upon a gal- 
lows. South Carolina, and the Southern fanatics by thousands, 
have apostatized from and rebelled against the indispensable feee- 
oo.m of the law; and if they are not executed on a gibbet, they 
will come to a still more disastrous and ignominious end. John 
Brown and his associates, and Gov. Wise, Ehett, Keitt, and their 
associates and conspiring traitors and apostates, stand on precisely 
the same platform in principle against the Union, except that the 
one revolted against the serfdom of the inferior race, and the other 
against the freedom of the superior race. The first may have at 
least the inferior races in its favor; the last is a simple conspiracy 
against human nature itself, as a complete whole, and can meet no 
sympathy the world around, except the sympathy of temporary, 
excited tumult and passion. If we could hold it still, it would 



94 

inevitably die in its own tracks. But we may undoubtedly set 
down the war of these two apostate, inhuman and unreasoning 
fanaticisms, as one prime cause of our present anarchy in the South. 
Another cause is the continuous subserviency of Northern 
doughfaces to Southern slaveholders, which has, in practical effect, 
invested them with the entire control and management of the 
government for many years past. Heal freedom has scarcely dared 
to peep under the Constitution and laws, for almost half a century. 
This is the most amazing and despairing view of all. That a free 
people, brought to the polls every year, under a government wholly 
in their control, and under a Constitution not only ignoring, but 
abjuring, all nobilities and castes whatever, should, year after year, 
steadily, practically stultify themselves, and paralyze their own 
constitutional power in the administration of the government, by 
throwing its whole force into the hands of one little clique, or 
caste, or oligarchy, of not more than three or four hundred thou- 
sand slaveholders, instead of giving it to the twenty millions of 
non-slaveholders in their own ranks — this is a fact that would have 
baffled all prophecy, and even now almost staggers all belief, as 
well as annihilates all hope for the ultimate success of any mode 
of free institutions in this present age of the world. I do not at 
all blame the South for this. It is both natural and also right for 
men to take power when it is offered to them, and use it as best they 
can. I blame the mean, contemptible, low-lived, doughfaced North, 
that never had, and I fear has not now, the manhood or the dignity 
to stand for its own safety and its own rights. By this course of 
policy, the slaveholders have become almost as much accustomed to 
their own rule, in Congress, and over the twenty millions of non- 
slaveholders, as they are on their own plantations, and over their 
three millions of negroes. So far, at last, has this proceeded, that 
all branches of the government combined are found as perfectly 
powerless to resist or restrain, not only their lawful acts of rule, but 
their confessedly unlawful acts of treason, rapine, robbery and civil 
war, as are the negroes on their own plantations. And still, even 
yet, these white negroes of the North sympathize with them, apol- 
ogize for them, and even aid and abet them, or at least submit and 
treat with them, in their crime and treason. Thus they have been 
constantly, nurtured to the habit and use of this enormously dis- 
proportionate share of power in the Union, till they have come at 



95 

last to feel and to believe that no cheek whatever should bo placed, 
or ean be placed, upon their free and absolute will, and, if it is 
attempted, that they will secede, and form an empire by themselves. 
Let no man, then, say that these three hundred thousand slave- 
holders have destroyed this government. It is not so; they had 
no power to do it. It is the twenty millions of abject non-slave- 
holders, led on by our Northern doughfaces, who have, time after 
time, sold out the Union, to save the State stocks and mortgage 
deeds to slave property, and other assets in their pockets, as Judas 
betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, and in the same way 
-ever with a line, smirking, hypocritical kiss of pretended fra- 
ternal peace of .- me sort; and they are just as ready to enact the 
same farce over again to-day as they ever were before, in spite of 
all that has happened, and, I fear, will be even more ready for it 
in 1864 than they are now. What wonder that these stern, unfeel- 
ing and unscrupulous Roman soldiers of the South should crucify 
a liberty which they can neither use nor understand, thus hypo- 
critically betrayed into their hand- ! 

But the immediate cause of the Una! explosion of this train of 
causes was the temporary and unexpected reaction of the majority 
(1 f the nonslaveholders against tins combined and procrastinated 
tyranny and treachery of the slaveholders and their allied dough- 
laces of the North; and, as all reactions are liable to go too far, 
the one now proposed to close up the only natural egress for 
slavery from this continent on the South, as well as arrest its 
spread aifd it- power on the North, and thus it shut up the slave- 
holder ias we have seen) and the black race together, to the terrible 
despair of fighting oul their final destinies in a climate which inevi- 
tably gave to the white race an ever-increasing supremacy of power 
and to the blacks an equally fearful final supremacy of numbers, 
with no possible hope of either real freedom or real peace to 
either race, except by lifting the black man into an equal, if not 
a superior democracy, on that same soil, or crushing him into 
utter insignificance and annihilation; and it is hard to tell which 
is, in reality, the most absurd, impracticable and cruel of the 
two possible plans. For the white race could not survive the 
one. nor could the blacks endure the other; hence nothing was 
left but blank, outright despair for at least one race, if not for 
both ; and, with the present power of the whites, which of the two 



96 

must, in fact, take the practical if not the actual extermination, in 
the end 2 Even the negroes themselves have sense enough to see, 
and hence, too, their despair. This new aspect of affairs at once 
fired the whole train of antecedent causes, and threw the slave 
States of the extreme South into an attitude of open rebellion and 
resistance, either for the purpose of again frightening the dough- 
faces of the North, and recovering again their lost empire in the 
Union, or of forming a new empire outside of it, under which 
slavery and the black race shall either have free scope to travel 
still on its journey South, or be sustained by political institutions, 
in harmony with its perpetual existence on the soil where it is. 
Probably some cherish at heart one of these plans and some the 
other. 

Thus it seems that the natural antagonism and mutual exasper- 
ation of these two fanaticisms — the one against the tolerance of 
the law in the North, the other against the freedom of the law in 
the South — nurtured, and inflamed and spread abroad by the 
inherent cowardice, and treachery, and insolence, and toryism of 
South Carolina politicians for almost half a century past, and the 
nurtured habit of the unquestioned supremacy of the slave power 
in the State meeting with a sudden and unexpected defeat: with all 
apparent hope of relief, for their slave population, toward the South 
thus cut off, combined with a cherished ambition for empire in that 
direction, either in the Union or out of it — are the real, moving 
causes of the present emeide. 

Whether the weak and contemptible old man at the head of the 
government was paralyzed by the explosion, or cpiietly and treach- 
erously aiding in the firing of these various trains, is perhaps not 
material to consider : for, in either case, he was alike, as usual, the 
mere tool of others, and has done nothing either for himself or his 
country ; but it is self-evident that but one of two things can now 
be done : First — Save the Union by the just, impartial and fear- 
less execution of its constitution and laws, at all risks and at all 
hazards whatever. Second — To sell it out by some sort of bar- 
gain or compromise with traitors, with arms in their hands and 
millions of its stolen property still in their possession — on some 
programme presented by their special attorneys in Congress and 
their doughface, stock-holding and stock-jobbing allies, and slave- 
holders and slave-dealers in our great cities at the North. 



97 

Bat, after we have thus saved the Union, and really found out 
that we have a government of some sort, at least, to use, we 
should take care, and in all proper ways pledge ourselves to use it, 
in advance, if need be, only for the ends of justice, and for the 
highest good of both of the two great races of men over which 
it i- to be administered ; and, if there is any truth in the principles 
of this book, the general government should never interfere with 
the master in any shape, either directly or indirectly, in the slave 
States — should in noway, by free States or otherwise, block up 
or impede the free exodus of the race toward the South, but in all 
possible ways encourage it as the only hope of either race; while 
it should restrain, by all proper means, their spread and emigration 
toward the North: tolerating and encouraging,- meantime, the 
presence of the black man at the capital, and on all public grounds 
and places, whether as a free man or a slave, within the general 
range of the territory on which it is proper for him still to remain 
— always preferring freedom to slavery and freemen to slaves, or 
to slaveholders, oven, where they can be had; but where they 
cannot, oppressing none, injuring none: nay, not even annoying 
any man, whether black or white, on the ground of any mere 
nal and conventional usage or law of human society whatever. 

There are two Ideas in connection with this subject that, if real, 
are truly most, appalling. The one is, that the whole South has 
come, at last, to the unconscious and unuttered conviction (but all 
ore real because if still is both unconscious and unuttered) 
that any democratic form of government whatever is totally incon- 
I with their cherished institution of slavery, and have there- 
fore instinctively set themselves about righting their position, 
without knowing or confessing the dreadful fact, even to themselves, 
that a military despotism is in reality indispensable to their condi- 
tion, whatever honeyed names and forms it may assume. 

The other idea is still worse: it is the suspicion that the South, 
under slave rule and nurtured mob law, have become so reckless, 
selfish and insolent, and the North, by so long cowering before 
that domination, have become so demoralized, mean, dastardly and 
cowardly, that neither party are lit any longer to preserve or to 
have free institutions, but both parties must alike go into the mill 
of despotism and be ground over again, along side of the negroes, 
before they can be refitted for any such high use. 
— 1 I 



98 

The developments of a few months will probably decide all these 
great questions; and that shows us, at once, that we are in the very 
midst of a political and moral crisis, such as neither this continent 
nor the history of the world ever but once before saw, and that 
was an event that shook the earth and darkened the sun itself. 

If it should turn out, in the end, that the South cannot any 
longer maintain free institutions, and needs and must have an 
entire system of government peculiarly her own, let her rebuke 
her present traitors, restore the property they have stolen and 
petition the North to let her go free, by mutual consent, and we 
are bound to do it by every consideration of right and of humanity; 
and all this gammon about inevitable civil war — if the thing is 
needful for them, and sought and. obtained honestly and openly — 
is a mere humbug. "We need not fight across a mutual slave State 
line, no more than we do across the Canada line, or across the 
same line now. Most true such a division implies costs and 
hazards, more or less, and is inexpedient in itself, if it can be 
avoided, and totally inadmissible as a concession to treason, under 
evert possible iiazard, but as a thing found indispensable to our 
friends at the South — if in fact it be so — and properly sought and 
obtained, by them, on grounds that do nut destroy the possibility 
of ail hope of any future government whatever — it is nothing so 
very dreadful, after all ; and I notice that those declaimers, who 
have some political "ax to grind," either North or South, have 
always been most loud and terrific on the utter hopelessness of all 
possible peace or civilization outside of our present form of Union. 
Why, lit is scarcely six months, now, since the whole gang of 
political traitors, and hypocrites and scoundrels who are now plot- 
ting its destruction, orated, in precisely the same way, about the 
unutterable value and necessity of the Union as it now is. But 
then they wanted to scare the Northern doughfaces, and drive a 
political bargain with them, which should place themselves in 
power in the Union as it is. Now it is quite another thing ; and, 
as they are not in power, they are quite ready to destroy it— not 
by a fair and honorable dissolution, but by the most open and 
shameless hypocrisy and treason. Just so some of the special 
attorneys of these traitors still talk, when they want to scare 
doughfaces; but if the slaveholders, and property owners, and 
sober, thinking men of the South— without the coercion of politi- 



99 

cians, minute men, vagabonds and beggars— deliberately come to 
the conclusion that their peculiar form of society needs a different 
i , ernment from ours of the North, and simply and quietly 
ask us to grant it, without any succumbing to traitors or any 
rous implication of all future rule, why, in the name of com- 
mon sense, should we not grant it to them, and let them manage 
their own affairs wholly in their own way, as well as to let them 
manage both, theirs and ours too, as they have done for twenty 
years past? We surely have stood it very well, and are still 
standing it very well, to let them manage both their affairs and 
ours, too: not only by law, but without law, by apostacy and 
treachery and outlawry of the most damnable sort; and if we can 
so quietly stand all this, and if all our old political grannies and 
bfaces and white negroes of the North can not only stand it, 
but connive at it, and apologise for it, they could surely afford to 
let the South manage simply her own affairs in her own way, if 
she realbj i ad properly seeks to do so. What so terrible in 

all this \ 

It is my own most unwavering conviction that it is utterly 
impossible for the South to allow of the freedom of speech or of 
the press, or to sustain any form of free institutions, coincidently 
with the idea, either of the perpetual and interminable slavery 
of the black race or of their emancipation on the soil. In the 
-e, the barbarism of the master, in the other case, that of the 
slave, would inevitably destroy all possibility of any such freedom. 
Under either of these ideas a, despotism of some sort, and of the 
strongest kind, too, is not only the best but the only hope of the 
South, and she ought to be allowed to choose it whenever she 
pleases properly to signify it, whether instituted under republican 
ormonarchial names and forms. But let her state her case and 
her wishes manfully and honestly. We cannot allow her political 
demagogues and traitors and low border ruffians to enact treason 
and institute a hypocrisy and a farce, in her name or in ours. 
Emigration and colonization of the black: race toward the south 
is, therefore, not only the only social hope of each race alike, but 
the full and free proclamation of this hope, with the great Southern 
highway ever open for their free passage to the South, is the only 
possible basis of free speech or a free press, or of any form of free 
institutions in the South, except in the bare name, like theEepublc 



100 

of Kome under the Caesars, or the Democracy of France under 
Louis Napolean. 

On the basis of this hope, duly proclaimed, appreciated, and fos- 
tered by the States and by the co-operating policy of the general 
government, the South might remain in the Union ; find all her 
interests secured; more secure than they have ever been before, be- 
cause placed on a humane and logical basis, that commends itself 
to the humanity of mankind ; all her institutions, both defensible 
and free; her taxes and expenditures light; and her future career 
one of unprecedented development, beneficence, glory and renown ; 
ever doing good to all races on the face of the earth, and evil to 
none ; and beloved and respected, therefore, by all, and hated and 
feared by none. Under such auspices, the North would feel easy, 
and willing to concede all ample time, and all possible aid to their 
brethren, thus striving to work out one of the greatest problems 
for the race, and of all ages of the world, and no longer be impelled 
to attack her State, and Church, and family, and even her philoso- 
phy, as the most hideous barbarism on the two civilized continents. 
And if the South cannot thus take up this policy and this new 
hope, and give it to all her people, black and white ; and if the 
North cannot thus quietly and humanely wait, and watch, and aid 
in its realization, the quicker the two parties peacefully separate all 
their formal political relations, the better it will evidently be for 
both ; for they can have no common element, either of philosophy 
or of faith, of government or of law, of destiny or of hope ; and it 
is possible that they should longer continue under the same insti- 
tution, only in bare name and pretense— not in reality and in truth. 
Why then try to play off the miserable farce in the face of the 
world ? Why longer make both parts of the government a perpet- 
ual correlative lie to each other, and a conscious hideous cheat to 
all the rest of the world, under pretexts of a union, when all possi- 
ble reliable union is a self-evident absurdity ? Civil war itself could 
scarce be worse, and far less demoralizing than such a mean, mis- 
erable, hypocritical farce, continuously enacted in the face of the 
civilized world ; for the meanest of all villains, though the least 
bloody, it may be, is the conscious hypocrite and liar. Let us 
have our manhood ; in Heaven's name let us have our manhood, 
though we have to take it, single handed and alone, and sink all 
mere" Unions and conventionalisms in the bottomless pit to get at 



101 

it : and if the true manhood of the South is, and must be, in its 
form, different from our own, and if there is no honorable help for 
it, no rational hope for a common development under the same 
final hope, and the same present forms, why, let her, in due form, 
seek to take her own destiny in her own hands, and go along with 
it as best she can, and God bless, and keep, and enlighten her as 
she goes. Why should we cripple, or restrain, or harm her, if she 
does not as>ail us; and she is bound, under her system, by four' 
million op justices of the peace, to keep the peace with all man- 
kind — bonds that are heavy enough in all conscience; and the 
North could make some treaties of alliance with every State on the 
the continent, in three months' time, that would render all undue 
extension of her empire, far more hopeless outside of the Union, 
than it ever has been within it. 

[t is most true that cotton is king, and must be for some centu- 
ries to come, simply because the interest of clothing the human 
race can, and will be, concentrated and monopolized in the manu- 
facture, while the collateral interest of feeding them cannot be. 
But then, it should be remembered that cotton is a king that, like 
South Carolina, holds to secession and a transferable patriotism. 
He lias already, u . and removed his throne from 

the midsl of traitors to more genial regions in the far South; and, 
as tilings are now going, it cannot be half a century before his en- 
tire court, and prime ministers, will be the myriads of black men 
between the tropics, instead of a handful of white mad-caps in the 
South, and all his great capitals and emporiums of commerce will 
be there; for he is evidently ashamed, both of his retinue, and of 
his company, where he now is. Queen flax is also evidently fit- 
ting up her royal robes, and preparing, meantime, to establish a 
Correlative, if not a rival empire in the far North ; and after South 
Carolina has been ground for half a century between the upper 
ami nether millstones of these two secessions, she will be look- 
ins- out for some new "transfer of her patriotism." 

If this secession should be. in fact, dealt with in strict accordance 
with those laws of nature, of freedom, and of God, which have al- 
ready been referred to, it will, in the end, prove the greatest bless- 
ing to this country and to the world, that has happened to it for 
many a year. It will, of necessity, break up and annihilate all 
those infamous and detestable hypocrisies, and shams, and lies, that 



102 

we were trying to enact, and to palm oft' upon ourselves, and upon 
the world ; it will show all good men at the North and the South, 
more clearly and more truly to each other, and to the world ; and 
cause them to fear each other far less, and respect each other far 
more ; it will disclose more clearly the true grounds, and peculiar 
nature, workings and value of our civil and social institutions, and 
lead either to their more ardent and earnest support, and to a bold 
and manly exchange, or readjustment of them to suit our present 
actual condition and wants; and if the South and the North only 
but once come to see each other, and all their peculiar relations, 
interests, wants and duties, both to white men and to black men, 
precisely as they, in fact are, the reign of quacks, hypocrites, 
knaves, cheats, liars and rebels, will cease ; the reign of reason, 
truth, and real righteousness commence ; and whether under sepa- 
rate and somewhat diverse forms of civil order, or together, and 
under the same forms as now, the whole country will, as a natural 
consequence, become more peaceful, prosperous, happy, glorious 
and free, than it has ever been before. 

Do men really think that God has undertaken to colonize this 
great continent with these two great races of men, and that he is 
now about to cave in, and back down, and give up the enterprise, 
and throw the whole continent back into a barbarism, because the 
great State of South Carolina has failed to appreciate properly, our 
paper constitutions, and laws, and under the temporary guidance of 
a few fanatical fools and traitors, refuses to obey them ? If this is 
really so, he had better abdicate the government of this part of the 
world, in favor of old General Jackson, and let us go on again to 
achieve the glorious destinies evidently before us. 

But, no. It is possible that we need checking and chastising, 
and even some new direction in our career ; but not its arrest, or its 
final or even temporary annihilation. Under the constitution of 
the United States, we started right ; right politically, right socially, 
right commercially, right industrially, right philosophically, right 
humanely, right morally, and right religiously ; and the man, the 
party, or the power that simply restores the administration to its 
original spirit and power, will be right before God and man; and 
if opposed and assailed by cowards on the one hand, or by rebels 
and traitors on the other, he will still meet the approbation of the 
truly wise and good in all ages, and the sympathy and respect of 



103 

the civilized world. May God in His mercy grant us the man and 
the grace for the hour. 

So far as the principles of the eternal justice are concerned, the 
constitution is well enough; and all we need is, that it should be 
enforced on all men — black, white, North and South. I would not 
imply, that in all its details, and all its words, it is absolutely infal- 
lible, as some seem to think it to be ; but that it is infinitely better 
than any other instrument that we could hope to construct in the 
.; condition of agitation, in which we are now thrown; for if 
we are — as facts abundant show — wholly incapable of its rational 

;• relation and adminstration, what sort of a figure should we 
cut in a council, over its reconstruction and amendment. Politi- 
cians, for instance, and even grave divines of the South, call on the 
North to put down by force of law, all "unchristian and violent agi- 
tation of the slavery question." Others call for the hanging of 
Henry Ward Beecher, Garrison, Sumner, Greeley and others. 
But for what' Why, simply and solely for freedom of speech!! 
Thus it is plain thai one of the first platforms in our new constitu- 
tion of freedom, must be either to punish or hang men for the hon- 
est utterance of their opinions!! Indeed, this is the main point 

ted upon by our Southern friends. Well, what, sort of a figure 
would a free Republic cut in the history of the world, which begins 
with punishing or hanging men forthe utterance of their opinions ? 
1 admit it is far better to do it by constitutional and' enacted law, 
than by lynch law, as it is now suffered to be dune in the South. 
But it seems to me it would be quite an innovation on our present 

itution, and the common idea of democratic freedom, to hang 
by constitutional law, all men who differed from us in opinion. 
And if this is to be the first article in the proposed constitution, I 
have some fears that even the doughface North, however servile 
in the past, mighl seriously object to the ordinance. For example: 
I have written this little book with the honest and hearty intent of 

iding the just rights of the master and the slave ; of the 
North and the South, I have givenit freely into the printers' hands 
to publish, if they see fit. I am well aware that in many things I 
have wholly erred; but whether I have erred ornot, I have 
some very particular and personal objections to being hung, even 
by a constitutional Republic, for simply writing it; and I am of 
the opinion that it Mould not be pleasant to my publishers to swing 



104 

for publishing it. I think we should therefore vote against the 
first article in the new constitution, whether anybody else did at 
the North or not. 

But leaving the general principles of the constitution to stand as 
they are, I frankly confess that it has ever been my opinion, that 
its provisions for administrative capacity and effect, are wholly de- 
fective, and on all philosophical grounds, call most loudly for some 
practical remedy, though I see not now how it could be supplied. 

The first defect in our practical administration relates to the dip- 
fusion of the franchise ; the second to the diffusion of intelli- 
gence; and I think the one has been suffered to run in quite too 
wide, and the other in quite too 'narrow limits. It seems to me 
that the true theory of republican government, and the only theory 
that can be widely and safely applied in this age of the world, is 
the theory of a succession of sovereignties, confined strictly to the 
established households of the white race on this continent. I do 
not believe that the gregarious multitude of rambling men and 
boys, with no fixed home, and no fixed responsibility for anything, 
can be safely intrusted with the conduct and the issue of our pecu- 
liar and critical responsibilities in the government of the diverse 
races and interests on this great continent. This individual sove- 
reignty and franchise rests on no principle whatever that is at all 
defensible, till all our woman and children are brought to the polls, 
as well as ourselves, and then its innate absurdity would be fairly 
and logically played out. 

But suppose we start with the principle of equal household 
sovereignty, and consider every house or family of white persons, 
in other respects eligible to that position, as the frimary, ultimate 
sovereignty in the land, and therefore to be entitled to one vote, 
to be cast by the lawful head of that family, whether male or 
female — all such heads of families or households to be recognized 
and registered by law, in the precinct where they vote, previous to 
their right to vote in that precinct. I think any thinking man 
will at once see the equality, justice and expediency of this system, 
and the great and terrible dangers which it would avoid, which lie 
inherent in our present system. I will not, therefore, argue in its 
defense, further than to say that it begins the organization of the 
the State precisely where God and nature begin the first organiza- 
tion of human society, and is therefore both natural and divine in 



105 

its origin and foundation. It alone recognizes the proper dignity 
and privilege, and presents proper encouragement and security to 
that elemental institution of God, the family. It relieves us of a 
ing and utterly irresponsible vote, in the shape of thought- 
ad reckless young men, wandering rovers and vagabonds, 
who care nothing for the family, or the State, and can be held to 
no proper responsibility for either. It is equal to the poor and the 
rich, for every family, high or low, would have one vote ; and as 
regards what that should be, it should be left to be decided by pri- 
vate <' a and moral influences, wholly among themselves; 
for the State should assume that a house or family cannot be divi- 
ded, just as the nation now assumes that a State cannot. Thus 
the family is the first or elemental empire; the school dis- 
trict the next in order; the town the next; the cottxty the next; 
the State the next; and the Union over all — a perfect, natural 
and logical system, starting out of the original germ planted by 
God himself. That this would result in a great contraction of our 
tit individual poll, 1 admit; but is there a thinking, unbiased 
man, either North or South, who does not see that such a contrac- 
tion would conduce greatly to the -lability, the good order and the 
dignity of the State '. ( m tin- ground, also, I approve of the law 
which, under the Constitution, recognizes the master as the head 
of Mi' household, however many slaves he may have; and I only 
wish tin; same principle was in effeel extended over the whole 
North. From what lias before been said, however, I am opposed 
to a black man's having anything to do with the political institu- 
tions of the United States, for tin 1 same reason that I am opposed 
to a white man's having anything to do with those in Liberia or in 
Ilayti, or in any other place out of his own natural climate, and 
under the Equator. For the rule of the white races in all the 
South, and of the black races in all the North, is an outrage upon 
nature, which should never be; tolerated, except in cases of dire 
iiy, where no other rule can be instituted ; and even then, 
only to meet such a temporary exigency. 

But the proper diffusion of intelligence is a still more impor- 
tant matter than the control of the franchise; for fifty thousand 
stupid or misinformed men could as readily destroy the govern- 
ment as twice that number, if they controlled the election by their 
own will. All parties, and all statesmen, from Washington down, 
— 15 



100 

have eloquently declaimed on the indispensable necessity of intel- 
ligence to the perpetuity of our free institutions. But what sort of 
intelligence is needed ? Must it be apposite intelligence ? or intel- 
ligence wholly inappropriate, and therefore useless, or wholly 
absurd and false, and therefore to the same degree dangerous in 
the extreme ? If a man had a ship at sea under his general care 
and superintendence, he would hardly fancy that reading about old 
Greece and Rome, whether in Latin or Greek, or about the laws of 
grammar, or the pure mathematics, or the fixed stars, would give 
him precisely the right sort of intelligence about the whereabouts, 
and dangers, and wants, of his ship at sea, Still less, if he was 
informed that it was in Japan, when in fact it was at Cape Horn ; 
or that it was still safe in the harbor, while it was almost in the 
great Northern Maelstrom ; would his intelligence be of mnch 
practical use to him. In other words, our intelligence must in all 
cases be specific, apposite and reliable, or it is only useless, or 
infinitely worse than nothing. If we mean anything, therefore, 
worth saying, when we speak of the intelligence indispen- 
sable to the safety of the Republic, we mean that all our voters 
should be duly supplied with specific, apposite and reliable 
political intelligence ; for it is self-evident that no other sort of 
intelligence can in the least degree aid them, in the discharge of 
their political duties. And yet, strange as it may seem, we have 
never, to this day, taken the least pains or care, after all our talk, 
to diffuse this precise intelligence among any portion of our people ; 
and we have never inaugurated one single rational institution, 
instrument, process or means for so doing. "We send our children 
into our schools, and they study everything under heaven but that ; 
and a bright, smart boy might stay in our schools, and study in the 
regular courses of instruction, and study hard and successfully, too, 
from the time he is ten years old till he is thirty, and come out 
without knowing definitely how the magistrate or clerk of his own 
county is appointed, or how the President of the Republic is chosen. 
So much for the schools. 

And as to the pulpit, the next great organ of public instruction, 
it is considered a sort of treason, ever to even refer to the subject 
in the u sacred dark," except down South, of late, they are getting 
to deem it quite orthodox, it seems, to preach treason out and out, 
against the government. But the next organ of public intelligence 
— the press — if regarded as a whole, is still worse, as every one 



107 

knows. Few men, it is known, can afford to take the papers and 
read them on all sides; as an inevitable consequence, each man, as 
a general rule, either from choice or from necessity, reads only the 
strictly exparte statements and special pleadings of his own party, 
all of which, oftentimes leaves him a little more ignorant than he 
would have been, if he had not read at all. Of course, under this 
slate of facts, if the citizen ever really gets at any specific, apposite 
and reliable political intelligence, lie must pick it up in the 
street, or where he can get it, for it is self-evident that the State 
has not taken either the least thought, or care, to provide him with 
it either through the school, the pulpit, or the press ; and yet the 
State mousingly and stupidly, even though truly, affirms that her 
own veey existence depends upon the universal diffusion of such 
intelligence among a!' of the people!!! Is not this truly 

marvelous? What if this state should keep saying, for a whole 
hall' century, that military and naval schools; arsenals and dock- 
yards; men-of-war, and an organized militia, are indispensable to 
her own i and still never move a finger to supply either, 

because we have A, B, C schools: some men have shot-guns and 
tow-boats; and pop-guns and bow and arrows; would 

thai be d? Or does the State assume that the bare gram- 

mars, languages, ologies and tologies, isms and seisms, of our 
schools ami out the weekly good round lies of 

their partisan presses, constitute exactly the sort of intelligence 
ill to the wants and duties of an American citizen, and ade- 
to the safety of the Republic ? What then shall be done ? 
1 cannot say what can be done and what ought to be done ; but I 
can suggest one course of policy that might have been originated 
at the outset of the government, which would have been, at least, 
in some degree, consistent with the declaration that intelligence is in- 
dispensable to Republicanism. But whether, with all our vested and 
antagonistic rights, or, at least, claims of right, it would be possible 
to institute any such safeguards now, I cannot say, fori am really too 
ignorant of the whole field to be able to judge even for myself. 
But some of our best statesmen can surely tell, or, at least, suggest 
SOME remedy for this great and appalling inconsistency and evil. 
Suppose, at the outset of the government there had been pro- 
of plain and simple political class books, explaining 
and illustrating by apposite and interesting concrete cases, and an- 
ecdotes, all the great fundamental and practical principles of free- 



108 

dom, and of our republican constitutions and governments, suited 
to the capacities and ages of our children, and introduced and 
taught in all our schools, and read in all oar families and social 
circles. Would not these be as interesting, and useful, and impor- 
tant to the American citizen, and furnish him as good mental dis~ 
cipline, and as apposite political intelligence, as the study of the 
laws and customs of Greece, or Rome, or Kamskatka, or China, or 
Japan ? Again : Suppose our clergymen should occasionally be 
allowed to enlighten the consciences of their hearers about some 
solemn, moral, and political duty, instead of calculating the area of 
Noah's Ark ; or the origin of the bow after the flood ; or the sort 
of whale that swallowed Jonah ; or the probable sins of the antedi- 
luvians; or preaching downright rebellion and treason as they now 
do in some places at the South ; would it be an unpardonable dese- 
cration of the Sabbath? But more than all : suppose the govern- 
ment had taken some reliable method, truly to report to its constit- 
uents and real sovereigns, its own views, acts, and doings, instead 
of leaving it to chance whether it was done or not ; or to a corrupt 
partisan press to misstate and misrepresent all facts and all princi- 
ples just as it pleases. For example : suppose the successful candi- 
date for the Presidency should be obliged by law to nominate and 
appoint an editor to edit weekly at the capital, one side of a large 
weekly political paper, and the next highest candidate required to 
edit or appoint an editor for the other side of the same paper, so 
that every man should find one side of that paper a correction of 
the other, in all matters of policy, principle, or fact, and thereby be 
able to judge of the real facts in the case, as a juryman does when 
he has heard both sides, and not simply one side of a case in court. 
Such a paper in the general government, in my opinion, would dif- 
fuse more specific, apposite, and reliable political intelligence 
among our people than all our schools, papers, orators and presses 
of the land, ever have done, or ever can do, under our present 
reckless and senseless system, if indeed, that deserves the name of 
system, which is in fact, only "chaos worse confounded." But, 
at any rate, if intelligence is indispensable to a Republican gov- 
ernment, as diversities of interests and populations, increase all 
hope of such freedom, must inevitably perish, without some more 
effective mode of diffusing that intelligence, than we have ever had 
as yet, Such papers might be either furnished at the public ex- 
pense to every voter, or safely left to be purchased by them at 



109 

such cheap rates as the government could well afford. The prac- 
tical result of these would be simply a weekly report to the voters 
— the p: sovereigns of the land — of the views and doings of 

their agents in power, on the one side of the paper, and a search- 
ing practical commentary of those views and doings, by their po- 
litical opponents, on the other side of the same weekly paper; only 
embodying the same principle in the legislative and executive 
branches of the government, involving the annual interests of thirty 
millions of people and hundreds of millions of money, which is 
now thought so indispensable, in every judicial case where the 
juryman is to decide on even the value of a dog, or of a ping of to- 
bacco, namely: that he should hear both sides simultaneously 
argued, and thus be put in possession of information or intelligence 
which is app - pecific, and reliable, in the case on hand ; and 

what other sort of intelligence is of the least practical present use, 
to any man, in any case on earth I For more than half a century 
now, tin- government has been saying that its very existence de- 
pended on the universal diffusion of such intelligence, (that is if its 
language means anything worth saying or worth hearing,') and still 
it has never taken the first rational step towards granting that in- 
dispensable supply; the people have asked for bread, and it has 
given them, in this line, only stone-, and scorpions; the one in life- 
less and useless generalities, which they could neither masticate 
nor digesl ; the other in a fiery partisan press, which bit and pois- 
oned, instead of nuturing and strengthening them; and even to 
this hour the government has no available reliable means, of even 
showing to one-half of the Union what the other half really thinks, 
wants, believes, proposes, and intends, or what is the real basis of 
its own policy, no more than the chief sachem of the Cherokees 
ha-. Such papers would be sought and read by all classes: and 
a- they would be edited by the first men in the nation, and as 
every falsehood, or mere pretense, or appeal, to low partisan pre- 
judice and passion, on one side of the paper, would be exposed and 
rebuked on the other; it would not only tend to assuage the passions, 
and elevate tin- tastes of all parties alike, but it would correspond- 
ingly elevate the general tone of the entire political press of the na- 
tion ; and if circulated gratuitously to every voter, who would pay 
the postage on it, it is doubtful whether the whole expense to the 
government would be much greater than our present system, 
of franking mere partizan papers and documents. The probable 



110 

effects on the present political press might, perhaps, array an oppo- 
sition against it, under one pretense or another, on merely selfish 
grounds : just as all improvements meet the steady, selfish opposi- 
tion of those parties on whose personal interests it is feared they 
may, in some manner, trench ; and some pretext of benevolence or 
philanthrophy is, therefore, at once set up against them. But if 
so, it would only show, the more clearly, the real spirit of our pre- 
seut press, and the real necessity for some such move in behalf of 
the people and institutions of the country. An editor who has any 
conscious self-respect, need not fear any such paper, but has every 
reason to hail and welcome it as the most desirable of all coadju- 
tors and allies ; and the quicker those who have none are out of 
the way, the better: at least for the public. Ot course such a paper 
would have nothing to do with advertisements, or mere local or 
ordinary interests of any sort; it would only be the government's 
own weekly political report to its constituents, attended with a 
constant commentary from the opposition, in such form as to give 
it the practical effect of able and opposing council in the great 
legislative forum of the nation, and thereby insuring the confidence 
and intelligence of the great body of these legislative jurors of the 
nation more fully than it will ever be possible to do under our 
present utter destitution of all system, and even of all effort to 
attain one, on this confessedly vital and fundamental interest. 
Why not be consistent, and conform our legislative department of 
the government to the judicial in principle, as it now is, or else 
give over one half of our jurors to the facts and special pleadings 
of the counsel on one side, and the other half to that of the counsel 
on the other side, or leave both sides to pick up their information 
in the street or from the popular press, as they can best find it ; for 
it is self-evident that accurate, specific and reliable intelligence is 
not as important, in deciding the value of a horse, or even the fate 
of a single man, as it is in acting upon the constant and complex 
rights and interests of thirty millions of men ; and even if we can- 
not secure the same certainty and the same system in one case as 
in the other, does that prove that nothing should be either done or 
attempted % It seems to me that if such a position is not too absurd 
for rational beings longer to tolerate, its necessary and inevitable 
results are too near at band to be much longer resisted, if indeed 
they are not already fearfully and fatally upon us. Does any 
rational man. really believe that if we had had such an organ in all 



Ill 

times past, it would have been possible to have thrown us into our 
present demoralized, absurd, distracted and contempible position? 
so pitiable, that even the Cherokee Indians regard and treat onr 
government with utter contempt. At this rate, how long will it 
be before the negroes, too, will try their hand at it? If history 
teaches lessons of truth, it cannot be a great while. The massacres 
of St. Domingo began first in a conflict for supremacy between the 
rival masters, and ended in the revolt of the negroes and the 
destruction of both of the ruling parties. No man who has any 
intelligent regard for the highest and best ultimate good of either 
party or either race, can look with complacency upon the inaugura- 
tion of such a train of causes on this continent, But how are the 
frequent repetition of such disasters to be forestalled and prevented? 
There are only two possible ways : the one by an increase of force; 
the other by an increase of such intelligence as is above described, 
for it is self-evident that the increase of the bare general intelli- 
gence diffused by the schbol, the pulpit and the press, as now used, 
has no tendency whatever to correct the evil, as we see from the 
appalling fact that our political degeneracy and corruption has 
Steadily increased with the increase of their power; and the most 
consummate scoundrels we have in the land — our boldest and 
mo.-t daring and successful defaulters, knaves, robbers, thieves and 
traitors — are not only found in our most highly educated classes, 
but some of them even in the very sanctuaries of our schools and 
sects. Shall we, then, invoke force, and organize anew our police 
of forts, arsenals, armies and navies, or shall we attempt some new 
method of inspiring the masses of our people with a higher degree 
■ lore specific and reliable political intelligence, so that their 
honest impulses, as well as their selfish interests, may have some 
sort of a fair chance to operate as a constant and steady check to 
the necessary corruptions of power, instead of falling as inefficient 
and hopeless tools into its hands for the worst uses and ends. 

Reader, would you yourself like such a paper? Or do you pre- 
fer to l;e the mere hoodwinked tool of some particular party, and 
its mere partisan press: Then why should you not have one? 
You could have it at less than half the cost you now pay for papers 
not half as able, interesting, instructive or valuable; and if you 
and all others would simply say so, it could be had, with far less 
cost and more advantage than our present absurd system of insipid 
negligence and indifference to all inevitable laws, and a'rl consequent 



112 

direful results. Which is really guilty of the most consummate 
folly, that nation that should professedly base its rule on force, and 
rely on the general forces of the schools, of gravity, electricity, 
&c, to sustain it, without any specific and reliable organized force 
directed to the precise end in view ; or that nation which bases its 
rule on intelligence, and relies on the same general and vague 
intelligence of the schools, without even an effort to make that 
intelligence either reliable, or specific, or apposite to the end in 
view ? If the folly in the one case is more apparent than in the 
other, it is only because the thing relied upon in the one .case is 
more sensuous and gross, and therefore better understood, and 
more easily seen and felt; and not not because the actual folly is 
any more real. Does not all the world know that any amount of 
knowledge, any sum total of means whatever, is in all cases alike 
totally useless, unless first efficiently directed to the specific ends to 
be accomplished ? The mere storing up of a sort of general intel- 
ligence has not one whit more of a tendency either to save or 
relieve us, in any particular crisis, than the mere storing away of 
gunpowder in all the shops and houses of the land would have a 
tendency to save us in time of war, without specifically applying it 
£o a single gun. It only renders it so much the more easy for our 
enemies to blow us all up together ; for an accumulated, unused 
and unguarded power, of whatever sort, whether material or spir- 
itual, must always, by law of nature and by ordinance of God, 
prove only a dangerous power; for it his will that no power what- 
ever should be safe, unless fully applied to its apposite use. 

Hence, the very increase of our general intelligence has only 
proved in fact a political curse to us, simply because we have 
refused, or at least neglected, to even attempt to apply it to its 
appropriate ends. 

Nor is it the least disparagement to our predecessors that they 
did not perceive all these things; for God opens the great book of 
the eternities to mortal men, one leaf at a time. Our fathers nobly 
saw and nobly read the page presented to them. It is not their 
fault that they could neither see nor read the one opened to us; 
and if we fail to do so, the fault must be forever our own, and not 
that of those who have gone before, or of those who shall come 
after us. 

Freemen of the land ! awake, arise, look and see ! Read, reflect, 
and act, or Ue forever fallen ! ! 



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